Creating as mummer is a means of making art larger and weirder than my normal self, an escape to a dream world of concepts and sounds more evocative and surreal than everyday life, than everyday “Alfie” could come up with. The visual representation of mummer is this ceramic mask:

Created by my father, it hung above the doorframe of my childhood home the first 18 years of my life. Always a great source of mystery and imagination to me as a child, this strange domestic guardian would go mostly unnoticed during the everyday comings and goings, an uncanny, folkloric presence tucked away, watching over. My aim through the music of mummer is to recreate the feeling this mask instilled in me as a child, to build a sonic world that this surreal devilish character belongs to, and to recreate the sense of folkloric mystery it entranced me with as a child.

Always process-led and texture driven, I first choose a stimulus, a source material that conjures this evocative childhood mystery, to act as a starting point and springboard for each piece. Stimuli are intuitively chosen, and can range from the primal roar of seasonal weather events (field-recorded thunder, coastal storms, crashing waves), the temporal confusions of candid found sounds (amateur foghorn videos, vintage radio plays/audiobooks on YouTube, folk performances on cassette), wildlife around me (screaming foxes, chattering magpies), film (The Lighthouse (2019), The Green Knight (2020)) and local history (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Saxon history).

Most recently making heavy use of DAW processing, the next step after choosing a stimulus is transformative, destructive sampling, warping and contorting the stimuli into the most monstrous, surreal, cacophonous version of itself I can, to surprise myself as I transmute the audio into unexpected new and absurd textures. I then bounce and collect these textures, collaging them together into gradually more complex pieces, destroying or subtly shaping audio to enmesh it within a larger ecosystem of noise, fluid compositions that naturally expand to long-form pieces of 6 to 20 minutes.

Uncanny folklorism, temporal ambiguity, elemental cacophony, ancient noise – synthetic chaos, field recordings, found sounds and transformative processing all weave the evocative sonic tapestry of mummer’s world.

Most recently I’ve been painting to invoke mummer, bringing audio into the physical space through installation, visceral texture and vivid colour. As large-scale acrylic portraits on board, the themes, stimuli and sound sources of the audio project are reimagined at mythic scales, using lighting and placement to create a feeling of looming, monolithic reverence.

The culmination of my MA work is a project titled “Anglo-Saxon”, consisting of two rooms of audio-visual installation for paintings and sound, exhibited at the MA degree show, and a soon to be released stereo album on Bandcamp and YouTube.