Music for Radio / Podcasts

ICON (BBC Radio 4)
This series seeks a closer understanding of our relationship with fame through facets of Elizabeth Taylor’s life. Produced by Alan Hall. My score is thoughtful, serious and dreamy, influenced by contemporary jazz, with piano, clarinet, cello, harp, sound design and wordless vocals – plus a banging club track at the end.

Obscene – The Dublin Scandal (BBC Studios / BBC Five Live)
A gruesomely fascinating mystery lives at the heart of this podcast, narrated by Adrian Dunbar. Musically, I have electronic textures living alongside harp, cello and piano to conjure a sense of the unknown.

Goodbye To All This (BBC World Service / CBC)
A beautiful and surprising depiction of one woman’s experience of losing her husband. I composed all the music and wrote and performed the theme song, under the expert guidance of radio producer Eleanor McDowall. The neoclassical-influenced score comprises shimmering harps, strings and mallet instruments.

The Escape Artist (BBC Radio 3)
I worked with one of my favourite radio/podcast artists, experimental storyteller Ross Sutherland, on this uniquely odd tale of poet, conceptual artist and boxer Arthur Cravan. For the score Ross wanted something very raw and visceral, so we used electric guitars and a battered family piano, playing the same mysterious theme over and over in different ways.

House Of Dreams (BBC Radio 4)
A beautiful radio doc from Eleanor McDowall and Falling Tree about an artist who lives in a work of art that reverberates with love, dreams, fantasies and past lives. Eleanor wanted the music to feel as home-made and unpredictable as the house itself, but still reflect the tender, warm story being told. We sampled loads of toys: marbles, pick-up sticks, a plastic wind-up turtle, an autoharp, and a music box, and created strange rhythmic loops out of them, which we juxtaposed with pianos and the warm sounds of the melodica.