Artist Statement

I am a British pianist and composer whose work explores the emotional, neurological, and human experience of epilepsy through music.

Music has been part of my life for more than thirty years but living with epilepsy has profoundly shaped the way I understand creativity. Some experiences associated with seizures are extraordinarily difficult to communicate through ordinary language. Fear, altered perception, confusion, isolation, memory disturbance, and the strange relationship between the familiar and unfamiliar can resist straightforward explanation. For me, music became another vocabulary.

‘Purple Universe’ grew from that idea. 

The album explores epilepsy not as one experience, but as a complex world containing many different perspectives and emotions. Pieces such as I’m Epilepsy, Post Ictal Confusion, Surrounded in Isolation and Outside Looking In use melody, harmony, rhythm, texture and atmosphere to interpret experiences that can otherwise be difficult to express.

Epilepsy has influenced my music far beyond simply becoming its subject. It has affected how I think about identity, vulnerability, uncertainty, memory, and connection. It has also made me increasingly interested in what music can communicate when words are inadequate. 

Much of my creative work is now driven by the idea of giving people a musical lexicon through which they can recognize, understand, or communicate experiences without necessarily having to find the words, or the courage to say them aloud.

With ‘Purple Universe’, I do not simply want to tell an audience about epilepsy. I want music to offer them an opportunity to enter its emotional landscape and experience an artistic interpretation of a world that is so often hidden from view.

Click to listen: https://www.purplechorus.com/purple-chorus-album/

Art