It is a music that I am focusing my creative energy through the emotionality and magic from the experience of listening as well as some wider sensory experience. The title Don’t Leave Me Behind is taken from some of the lyrics from the end of the piece. I love how evocative of stories and emotive states this phrase is. It evokes situations that can be used in a mundane everyday, like when a bus doesn’t stop or when you don’t want to take your child shopping because it would be quicker without them, or in very epic life-and-death journey situation or how educational institutions can function or how we treat the most vulnerable people in our society.

My art feels very much a “you are what you eat” kind of art.

The musical thing I eat most is radio shows. When writing especially for Ensemble Modern, I am wanting to make an acoustic orchestral ensemble that can not only work as a vast biological being made from these special musical artists but also listen and respond to many musics in our society, many of which are not at all acoustic but substantially electronic. I want to do this in a way that is nevertheless still celebrating the rich humanity of each of the individual instrumentalists in the ensemble.

World building is something I am interested in especially as its use in video games and films and SF (sci-fi, string figures, speculative fiction). The piece is a world and within the world there are tunes and activities and things and creatures and people and emotions and gay people.

I am influenced a lot by sampled based music like Madlib, Hudson Mohawke, Susumu Yokota… but nothing I write/make is actually sampled in that way, everything is original. I really like writing the actual tunes and chords and grooves and melodies so this is the last thing I would want to outsource. More than that, I feel that me writing a tune is the most important aspect of my craft. For me in my music, the tune is the aspect of the music that contains the most “soul” or “complexity of the subconscious” or “humanity” or whatever you want to call it.

The piece constantly teases with a ghost of the “singing” voice. It uses many choral, belting, vocal samples in the synths, real live singing from the ensemble, and also the singing/sampled voices of me and my best friend Joy (in the titular song at the end of the piece).

Alex Paxton