Look How Brightly

Look How Brightly is my debut album: a body of work shaped over a decade, bringing together ten of my most personal and uncompromising pieces. A ‘portrait album’, it unfolds as a sequence of interconnected musical states, tracing an emotional and psychological journey through intimacy, conflict, grief, ritual and renewal.

Released in May 2026 on Delphian Records

“Look How Brightly is about the messiness of being human. About how life, love and identity exist in a constant cycle of breaking down, transforming and regathering.”

Musical lines move together in unison, split apart, and gradually find new forms of alignment and integration. Patterns repeat, disintegrate, and reform; moments of stillness give way to surging motion. Stark, ritualistic textures open up into something unexpectedly vulnerable, lyrical and tender.

The album draws on a wide range of influences, from the Tibetan Book of the Dead to trauma theory, from keening traditions to the pounding energy of club music. It sets up a space where different emotional and psychological states can coexist, rather than neatly resolve.

Photo: Diana Gomez

“Ten years. Ten tracks. Ten emotional states.”

Look How Brightly the Universe Shines! (2021)
Driving unisons splinter into shimmering textures in a kinetic piano trio that explores tension, fracture, compassion and reconciliation at challenging times.
Strings Attached (2020)
Violin and piano inhabit a fragile unison ritual, where a shared melody moves between fusion and separation in an intimate dance of listening and togetherness.
BARDO (2021)
BARDO moves from mantra-like stillness to streams of consciousness and a haunting breath chorale for voice and strings. Time dissolves into breath and spiritual transcendence.
Release Me (2025)
An instinctive, prayer-like song of invocation and release, where voice and piano yield to vulnerability and transformation.
I Love You, My Darkness (2024)
A gem-like meditation on radical self-acceptance, setting a single melodic thread against rippling piano in a moment of intimate surrender.
Scapegoat (2025)
A driving string quartet inspired by club music and propelled by a kick drum pulse, where looping rhythms fracture and reform in a ritual of blame and release.
Fragment (2018–2022)
A volatile string quartet. Fractured musical cells collide and reform, reflecting the complex process of fragmentation and reintegration within the self and the shamanic practice of ‘soul retrieval’.
Dirges for the Living (2015)
Inspired by vocal keening traditions, these austere string laments give form to the unresolved grief we carry, moving through sorrow toward fragile acceptance.
One is Fun (2016)
Two violins wrestle between merging and splitting apart in a turbulent unison duet that exposes the tension between co-dependence and autonomy.
The Body Keeps the Score (2019)
Echoes of Gaelic keening haunt a stark dialogue between viola and percussion, revealing the lingering imprint of trauma in the body, inspired by Bessel van der Kolk’s of the same name.

Below: photographs from our recording session at SJE Arts, Oxford, July 2025, by Ben Reason:

Recording session: SJE Arts, Oxford, July 2025

Collaboration at its core

I was very lucky record with dear friend and collaborator, contralto Jess Dandy, and the amazing ensemble CHROMA (Caroline Balding violin, Natalie Klouda violin, Kay Stephen viola, Clare O’Connell cello, Roderick Chadwick piano, Steve Gibson & Rob Farrer percussion.

I’ve long been drawn to the work of CHROMA ensemble, and working with them on this recording has been a real joy. They bring tremendous sensitivity to the detail and emotional weight of this music, alongside an openness that allows it to feel alive and effervescent.

Cellist Clare O’Connell has been a close collaborator over many years. Her insight and musical instinct have been fundamental to the development of several of these works, and she actually commissioned the title track, Look How Brightly the Universe Shines!, in 2019.

Jess Dandy is another treasured collaborator of mine and essential to this body of work. She sings with a unique clarity, directness, vulnerability and emotional depth that feels both grounded and transcendent. BARDO; I Love You, My Darkness; and Release Me were all written especially for Jess’s extraordinary voice.

Even the cover art emerges from collaboration, featuring the work of Singaporean artist Dawn Ng, a long-term collaborator whose work I find deeply inspiring. The image is drawn from her Clocks series, where monumental blocks of frozen pigment are left to decay, tracing cycles of accumulation, transformation and the passage of time that echo the album’s central themes.

A musical working through

Taken as a whole, Look How Brightly is not a fixed statement, but a process - a kind of working through of musical preoccupations and poignant themes from the last decade. It marks the end of one chapter in my musical work and the beginning of a new one, and I’m pleased to finally share it with the world.

My thanks to Delphian Records for their belief in this project, and to my friends and loved ones who have supported me throughout its creation.

Finally, this project would not have been possible without the generous support of: PRS Foundation, Marchus Trust, Vaughan Williams Foundation, Hinrichsen Foundation, Malcolm Herring, Les Azuriales, and The Nicholas Boas Charitable Trust. I’m deeply grateful for their support.

Photo: Diana Gomez