Sound · Music · Place · Culture
I'm a broadcaster, curator, sound artist and creative director, based between London and Tokyo, who has spent thirty years chasing the same question in different forms: what does a place actually sound like, and what happens when someone finally stops to listen to it?
That question has taken me through broadcasting, music curation, sound design, research, and cultural strategy — always circling back to the same idea. Sound isn't decoration. It's how a place, a brand, or a moment actually gets remembered.
In 2010 I founded MSCTY to bring that thinking together properly — working with brands, cities, cultural organisations, architects, researchers, artists and musicians to build sonic experiences, cultural programmes, and strategies that make places feel more like themselves.
MSCTY
MSCTY started small - an exploration of sound and place, working city by city, location by location, to make site-specific music and sound experiences.
Sixteen years on, it's grown into something broader: a practice sitting at the crossing point of music, sound, culture, technology, environment, and people. Soundtracks for cities. Interventions in public space. Installations, workshops, soundwalks, radio, live events, and collaborations with architects, universities, and global brands.
The aim hasn't changed since day one - use sound to make a place, or an experience, more distinctive, more meaningful, more alive.
What I do
Sound & Cultural Strategy
I help organisations work out what they actually want to sound like - and then help them mean it. Sonic identity, music programming, and the wider cultural thinking that sits behind both.
Sound & Place
Soundscapes, spatial audio, site-specific work — built for the buildings, hotels, public spaces, and cities that commission them, not lifted from a stock library.
Music & Cultural Programming
I curate the artists, the music, and the listening experiences that connect an audience to something real — for brands, festivals, cultural organisations, and venues.
Research & Wellbeing
Working alongside scientists, universities, and technology partners to understand what sound actually does to us — how it shapes perception, environment, wellbeing. Recent work has included the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), Sony CSL, and the University of Tokyo.
Broadcasting & Media
Broadcasting is where I learned to listen properly, and it's stayed the throughline of everything since — a direct line to audiences and to the wider currents of international music culture.
I've worked with BBC Radio 3, BBC 6 Music, BBC World Service, XFM, InterFM, Tokyo FM, Dublab.jp, and Monocle Radio, where I currently present Tokyo Music Hour — an ongoing dig into Japanese music and culture. Alongside that: Chief Music Editor at iTunes, and years spent as an A&R consultant, playlist curator, and album compiler for record labels in Britain and Japan.
Sound, music and listening
My work has always lived in the space between music and sound — not quite one, not quite the other.
I'm interested in what happens in that gap: how music builds a sense of place. How environmental sound quietly shapes mood and behaviour without anyone noticing it's happening. How listening, properly done, reconnects people to where they actually are. How new technology keeps opening new ways to experience all of it.
That curiosity has taken shape as field recordings, spatial sound installations, music programmes, festivals, radio, research, experimental listening spaces — often with me acting less as an artist and more as a kind of sonic go-between, pulling artists, scientists, technologists, communities, and brands into the same room around a shared interest in sound.
Japan
Tokyo is home now, and Japan has become something more than a location for my work — it's a source. A place I keep returning to for inspiration, research, and collaboration.
The work here connects Japan's extraordinary music and listening culture to bigger questions — about cities, technology, environment, wellbeing — through partnerships with universities and research institutions, public programmes, and ongoing collaborations with Japanese artists, brands, and organisations.
Japan isn't a subject I document from the outside. It's where a lot of my thinking about sound actually starts.
Work with me
I've spent more than thirty years getting paid to listen to things, which still doesn't feel like it should be a real job, but here we are.
Depending on what you need, I turn up as a creative director, a sound strategist, a curator, a broadcaster, a sound artist, a research collaborator, or a producer - sometimes several of those in the same meeting, which is confusing for everyone, including me.
What I'm actually reliable at: understanding how sound behaves in a space, knowing an unreasonable number of people who make interesting music, and asking annoyingly simple questions until a project starts making sense.
If you're building a place, a brand, a programme, or an experience, and you've got a nagging feeling that sound's been treated as an afterthought when it really shouldn't be … that's usually where I come in.
Get in touch. I promise I'm easier to talk to than this website makes me seem.