It is still dark, and rain pings softly on a metal chimney cap. The sound is carried down into a basement where, for some time, I have sat at a small desk selecting words to project from this private space onto a screen, on the other side of which, are you.

Hello, and thanks for reading.

Crossing that threshold from private to public was not so easy for me – I am out of practice. But here I am. Through publishing, I’m looking for a focusing effect. To be presented, a piece of work needs a frame. Pulled out of an amorphous stream of ideas and incremental progress, it becomes a thing.

In this basement, I have filled a growing stack of notebooks with private writing; spent many hours tinkering on various projects like this website; and most of all worked slowly towards recurring ideas of a visual art derived from sound, particularly birdsong. The ideas range from abstract generative art with sound as the seed, to pure representations of organic information that are also beautiful as marks on a page, even if a person does not know what they represent. Sound as a symbolic language, mysterious calligraphy, primitive dream-like markings.

I’m far from anything like that, but I have made some progress which I plan to share here, along with whatever interests me in the future. Let’s see what happens.