False Self

False Self compositions are systems music works that explore the boundary between self and other. The series began in 2016, and so far comprises of five collections of compositions.

• False Self Reads Bangor Sitting Meditations (upcoming)

• False Self Eats Percy's Worms (2024)

• False Self Plays Music For Six Pianos (2021)

• A False Memory Of A Sports Party (2018)

• False Self (2016) 

False Self (2016)

The first iteration of False Self was a generative system—an algorithmic musician, built in SuperCollider, designed to play and compose alongside my true self. The program can 'hear' and respond to my improvisations by outputting MIDI harmonizing information, voiced through a sound module. I named him ECHOES. He stores all of our joint improvisations as MIDI musical notation. He forgets nothing.

The project frequently gave rise to the question of what 'good' taste is, and why something might be said to have it. ECHOES may have followed all of the rules, but due to some unforeseen condition he would make a decision that would take me off guard and lead my improvisations into new territory. At times I would write accompanying parts myself, then later question whether they had been composed by my true self or by ECHOES.

A decade on, listening back to the album, I can no longer reliably tell which passages are mine and which belong to the digital imposter.

A False Memory of a Sports Party (2018)

If our memories provide the blueprint for our identity, what happens when our sense of self is built on a faulty recollection? The second album in the False Self series, A False Memory of a Sports Party, was inspired by Elizabeth Loftus's pioneering research into memory distortion and the generation of false memories.

Once again I worked with ECHOES, the algorithmic musician I had authored in SuperCollider for my 2016 album False Self—collaborating in that fertile area where composition and improvisation meet. This time, though, the creation passed through two distinct stages. First, ECHOES and I generated MIDI data, which I sonified using a selection of electronic instruments designed in the late 1980s and early 1990s—early digital attempts to synthesize and sample acoustic sound. These instruments have a clunky, strange, counterfeit tone that I find fascinating.

I then sat with the material for thirty days before reworking it alone, in a final phase of digital postproduction—or, to use Loftus's term, distorting it. I thought of this remoulding as akin to a memory being altered by time.

The disturbing voices that haunt the album are sampled from a session between the psychiatrist R.D. Laing and his client Rory. They speak of past traumas, though neither Rory nor Dr. Laing can say for certain whether what is recalled are lucid recollections or fantastic confabulations.

False Self Plays Music For Six Pianos (2021) 

The first two albums in the False Self series blurred the line between my own compositions and those of a digital shadow. With False Self Plays Music For Six Pianos (2021), I turned outward, seeking instead to merge existing compositions and explore the musical languages of other working musicians—focusing, in particular, on the self-similarities between different jazz standards.

False Self Plays Music For Six Pianos was composed whilst undertaking lessons with Jim Denizen Simm. Jim generously introduced me to his own working methods, as well as those of several of his colleagues—many of them former members of the Scratch Orchestra, including Michael Parsons, John White, Christopher Hobbs, and Howard Skempton. These lessons led me to abandon SuperCollider in favour of working with more flexible, and to my mind, more interesting systems designed on paper.

The resulting works from this period are experimental, system-based compositions for six pianos. The four compositions employ integer tables to organise one hundred and ninety-two fragments of slow, jazz-inflected piano music. Each piano is assigned eight musical cells and one silent cell. The cells unfold as hypnotic cyclones of repetition, moving in and out of synchronisation with one another to create complexity from simplicity. As the compositions progress, the cells extinguish themselves in a languid, stuttering fashion—before the process begins anew.

Learn more and purchase at Cafe OTO.

The False Self series continues with False Self Reads Bangor Sitting Meditations (2026).