CONTRAST | 13 JANUARY 2026 | LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Personal and universal. Human and synthetic. Grand and delicate.
These were not conceptual decisions so much as necessities - forces that insisted on being present in the album I’ve just completed. I didn’t reason my way toward them; they arrived intuitively, as contrasts tend to. There is something fundamental about polarity - about meaning revealing itself only when placed against its opposite.
In more recent experience, this polarity has widened. Not just moment-to-moment, but macro-scale: months of intensity, immersion, velocity, followed by periods of near stillness, where everything feels suspended, emptied out, waiting. I’m fortunate to have friends who move through life with a similar poetic, non-judgemental attentiveness, people who understand that this oscillation is not pathology, but structure. That this, too, is the nature of things.
Sound itself obeys this law. A longitudinal wave; compression and release. Peak and valley. The amplitude; the distance between them, is what determines loudness. And I am not someone built for a quiet life. Still, there is a sobering clarity in recognising that the universe appears to demand equivalence; that every summit of intensity may require a corresponding descent.
Homer offers a consoling inversion. In The Iliad, the gods are said to envy humans, not for our power, but for our capacity to feel. For the fact that our lives are finite, and therefore charged. Joy and grief, love and loss, exhilaration and boredom are inseparable, and it is precisely this fragility that gives experience its weight. Knowing this, I would choose intensity every time.
So I move into 2026 with the same resolve, now sharpened rather than softened: full commitment to the work I feel called to make, and a deliberate refusal of anything that does not align. I trust that this commitment keeps me in right relation with the world, that I will be met and supported. But I no longer romanticise the cost. This way of living carries real risk. Real vulnerability. Real pain.
And still, I would not trade it. Because I can feel the next ascent gathering. And it is higher than the last.
Image: Apollo and Dionysus, by Leonid Ilyukhin (Apollo representing order, reason, light, logic, self-control, purity. Dionysus representing chaos, irrationality, passion, emotion, frenzy, instinct.
