A four-track reworking of pieces by Australian pianist and composer Sophie Hutchings, commissioned for World Sleep Day 2026.
On first encounter, Sophie's music immediately gives you a sense of space and place, which I've always felt were the two defining qualities of ambient music. So when I was approached to rework tracks from her beautiful 2025 album become the sky, I felt that there was an immediate common language, even across our two very different stylistic approaches. It also came as no surprise to find that a lot of her work was based around coastal nature — transitional spaces which define boundaries between natural systems.
Moving to Suffolk has grounded a lot of my practice in the same consideration, and so these reworkings came with great facility. Using her studio recordings as a palette, I made heavy use of granulation to stretch and smear the music into beatless, abstract textures which retained their compositional structure and harmony, but allowed me to draw out the subtleties in the studio mixes.
Mirroring her field recordings from her Australian home which thread throughout the record, I made some of my own in nearby Tunstall Forest — a reflection of our shared ecosystem even on the other side of the planet — and made use of cut-and-paste sampling techniques, reordering her piano lines into collage and thus transforming her natural landscape into mine.
If dreams are how we process our experiences, then this record isn't a technical remixing of the original work, but more a response to it. Music dreaming.
Sleep tight.
Digitonal in Suffolk. 2026.
