Remnant

In 2024, I was commissioned by the contemporary dance company James Wilton Dance to create a cello-based score for a new work entitled BACH Reimagined. I have since had the privilege of touring this piece extensively with James and Sarah Wilton and delving deep into this challenging and rewarding work. Empyrean, my third studio release, is the music from the BACH show, reimagined as an album.

One of the main guiding threads of this piece was the intersection between Baroque counterpoint and modern metal. Musically, Empyrean is a dialogue with Bach across the centuries, weaving together Baroque purity with post rock, electronic textures, and experimental noise, uniting the atmospheric and ethereal quality of Worlds Within with the Middle Eastern melodies and metal edge of Lifeblood.

While Bach’s music serves as an impetus for some of the compositions here, it is the immortality he achieved in pursuing the divine through art that serves as the core inspiration for this work.

As artists, we spend our lives trying to create something that transcends the everyday, if only for a split second - as if to glimpse eternity through a keyhole. We create so that we can be witness to the numinous, to commune with the mystery of being. And even after we are gone, others can experience this same wonder through our creations. While my previous release Lifeblood dealt with matter - the physical body, and mortality, this album exists in an ethereal plane, the realm of the spirit. It is about the search for the sublime, the highest zenith, the Empyrean.