How did it all start for you?
I learnt keyboard and piano from a relatively young age, but was never particularly good at practicing instrumental playing. Around my teenage years, I developed an interest in singing and started taking vocal lessons, whilst also taking music theory and performance at school. At that point, I was quite inspired by jazz music, and it was also around that time when I developed a keen interest in electronic music. It was when I first listened to Matthew Herbert’s Bodily Functions album – I must have been 15 – that I started thinking about music making in more conceptual ways.
I’ve only started experimenting with making electronic music in my early 20s, and then moved to London to study music at university – an experience that allowed me to sort of reinvent myself. Semi Precious, the pseudonym under which I still release music to this day, was conceived during my time in university and as I started experimenting with layering my vocals on looped samples. I went on to release a few singles, EPs and albums, which were for the most part theme-based and conceptual in nature. In 2016, I released an album titled Ultimate Lounge, which was a tongue-in-cheek, sample-based homage to my fascination with lounge music. At the time, I was also heavily inspired by genres like vaporwave and producers like Burial, which really changed my perspective on what electronic music can be. I was fortunate enough to have been part of a collective of South London producers who pushed me to stay creative, whilst also performing in live venues and immersing in local clubbing scenes. Throughout the years, I also pursued a lot of collaborations with visual artists, which is something I still very much enjoy.
A year before the pandemic hit, I undertook a PhD in music production. I now have some reservations about how I approached the research, but it was certainly a very meaningful and enriching experience. After completing my studies, I rented a small studio space and recorded another EP titled Sun is Out – possibly my most exposed and vulnerable work to date, also in terms of the stripped-down, rough-round-the-edges production. With this work, my practice has also slightly shifted towards presenting with visual collaborators in gallery settings rather than playing gigs in traditional music venues. Currently, my performance energies are very much channelled into university lecturing and working with music students, which is my (very inspiring) day job.
When, why and how did you view your practice as research?
The short answer is that my music making has for the most part been intertwined with my academic studies. I studied my undergraduate degree in an art school environment, and that really informed how I approach developing creative work till this day. I was fortunate enough to have had mentors and teachers that gave me a lot of creative freedom to experiment and pushed me to reflect on the ideas and contexts that inform my music making process.
This critically informed approach to music making – perhaps more aligned with visual art practices – is probably not very common amongst musicians, but I have, for the most part, found it productive. When I’m in the studio, I actually prefer working quite quickly and impulsively (at least in the compositional stages) and generally avoid doing things like rerecording parts or rewriting lyrics. But I do enjoy having some kind of overarching theme or compositional approach that frame each musical release I’m working on, as creative and reflective interrogation.
I also feel that, through my music making, I’m able to make sense of and process certain personal experiences in ways that are not accessible otherwise. For example, in my doctoral project, I produced music that attempted to conceptualise sentiments towards lost clubbing experiences. I guess it’s not unusual for musicians and artists to turn to creative making as an outlet for processing personal experiences. In this sense, it can be said that all musicians are engaged in some form of (autoethnographic?) inquiry, even if such inquiry cannot be measured and validated in academic terms.
I generally think of myself as a musician conducting academic work, rather than the other way round (even though I make a living from teaching in a university). I perceive my released albums, EPs and singles as my creative research output, and feel less comfortable contributing to book chapters and traditional journal articles. But I do feel comfortable making music in a “safe” learning environment that is about asking questions, having conversations and exchanging ideas.
Have there been challenges when viewing and interrogating your practice through a researcher’s lens?
There certainly have been challenges. In fact, I’m still trying to work out the boundaries and overlap between my music making and research. The PhD experience was particularly complex for me in terms of navigating these two things. I did gain a lot from the long conceptualisation process that informed the study and creative work, as well as from attempting to very clearly define my intentions and insights. But that can be a double-edged sword. What I mean by that – and this is something that is often said about artistic practice-based research in academia – is that when you’re constantly thinking about how to communicate your intentions with clarity and coherence, there’s less space for artistic ambiguity. There is also something contradictory about working with a “hypothesis” or a pre-conceived argument as a starting point for a creative process, which is open-ended by nature.
The fact that I’m a releasing musician further complicates the position from which I pursue research. With my PhD, for example, I was very focused on the finalised end-product (an album of 10 songs) and its “packaging”, thinking about how it will be commercially released and realised visually. This line of thinking has some advantages – it can help in getting creative work done and published, and I admittedly also very much enjoy the visual worldbuilding and branding aspects that come with releasing albums. However, a heavy focus on finalising and perfecting an artefact can, to some degree, counter the reflective process that defines research and creative experimentation.
In the last few years, I became more engaged in trying to capture my creative insights in ways that are suitable to the type of musician-researcher that I am. I’m interested in finding flexible and less rigid formats for conveying ideas and fusing practice-based work with reflection. A big part of this for me is to do with finding language that is less edited and more associative and conversational – to correlate with how a creative process unfolds. Even as I write these lines, I find myself trapped in trying to make sense, rather than being creative, playful and experimental. And so I do feel that there is a need to establish spaces for artist-researchers like myself to articulate what their practice is about, in ways that are perhaps less “academic” and more open-ended.