Well, this is a moment worth marking. 😁🎉 The halF unusuaL YouTube channel has reached 600 subscribers, and the project has released 27 cult classics. Cult Classics may be getting a little ahead of ourselves, of course, but let’s not allow that to get in the way of a perfectly good excuse for an celebration. First, a genuine thank you to everyone who has clicked that little button to see more. I’m delighted you’ve decided to come along for the ride, and really grateful that

Listen along (Spotify Podcast) Watch audio-visual (YouTube) What are we building in there? There’s no audience for this. It’s a worry. “We’re making one”, was the answer. I had been thinking about mice … again. Douglas Adams had a thing about mice. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, we discover that mice are not quite what they appear to be. We had assumed that humans are the clever ones and mice are, well, mice. Turns out we got the hierarchy wrong. It’s a good joke. W

Watch audio-visual (YouTube) Not unusually, it started with a question that was more of an itch. I’d been playing with generative image and video models for a while, and one thing kept nagging me: when people talk about “AI” making an image, it’s easy to imagine a singular thing called AI sitting behind the curtain, waiting to produce an output. But that’s not how it works. There are models. And lots of them. They have different training histories, architectures, and tendenc

Listen along (Spotify Podcast) Watch audio-visual (YouTube) There comes a point in any sufficiently prolonged encounter with the internet when a perfectly ordinary word starts to look a little suspicious. For me, that word recently became content. A piece of content. Content creator. Content strategy. Content marketing. Content consumption. Content engagement. Content performance. Content everywhere. Yet the more I thought about the word, the less certain I felt that everyone

Listen along (Spotify Podcast) Watch audio-visual (YouTube) There is something slightly ridiculous about writing a long essay about algorithms, attention, and the way platforms encourage us to make everything shorter and more immediately consumable. Because this is, of course, a blog post. And apparently nobody has time for those any more. Two-minute reads. Five things you need to know about the ten things. The thing you can understand before your coffee gets cold. So this on

I’ve been making some sleepcasts. That sentence sounds fairly straightforward. There are, after all, an awful lot of sleepcasts on the internet. But these aren’t quite what I expected them to be. The first one began with an idea about making a kind of dream story: something with enough narrative to give the mind somewhere to wander, but without demanding that it actually follow the story. A voice, some sound, some slowly moving images, and a story that gradually becomes less

Most Monday mornings I swap my digital audio-visual tools for something much more analogue: trowels, loppers, and secateurs. Mondays are when I join a volunteer gardening team at a public garden in Nottingham to keep weeds at bay and roses pruned. It's a welcome break from screens, and our work is rewarded with coffee and cake at the end of the session. 🤗 Sometimes that back-to-nature time loops back into the digital world, though ... What else do you do with a bucket full

We hardly notice electric light anymore. A flick of a switch, a glowing screen, headlights passing in the rain. Electricity has become so ordinary that it’s almost invisible. Yet every light bulb is a tiny performance – energy flowing, resistance building, a filament vibrating with heat until it glows. This week’s Disquiet Junto challenge began with exactly that: a recording of a light bulb itself. Not a synthesiser imitating electricity, but the microscopic sounds produced a

There’s a persistent question surrounding AI-generated imagery: Did the machine really create anything? It’s an interesting question, but I suspect not the most interesting one. For this latest experiment I started with just two images. One is almost absurdly simple: a handful of black blobs on a white background. The other is a dramatic, adjusted photograph of a tree. Those two images become the only visual ingredients fed into the system. Everything else is exploration. By

I’ve been thinking a lot about AI in art of late. I'm not sure the question is whether or not a machine can make pictures. We know it can; we see them everyday. Maybe the more interesting, or perhaps fruitful, question is whether a human can build a creative process that genuinely surprises them. That’s where things become really fascinating. The latest halF unusuaL YouTube short is the result of many hours experimenting, masking, editing, discarding ideas and stitching toget

As you're no doubt aware, you have to play a track on endless repeat on Spotify for something silly like 4 years to benefit the artist as much as buying the track from Bandcamp! Just saying 😇 A three-track EP of the little trio we released over the last 3 Fridays, gaps, has just dropped on Bandcamp ... 🙏❤️

Apparently we managed to release it exactly one week after International Capybara Day. We’d love to say that was carefully planned … but discovering we’d missed it by seven days somehow feels entirely appropriate. This is the final release in our little “gap” trilogy. The same lyrics appear once again, but this time they’ve been transformed into something altogether stranger: squeaky chipmunk-style vocals, bouncing pop energy, a chorus of tiny mice and, of course, an unhealth

Some ideas arrive with great seriousness. But there are others that arrive because someone says ‘gapybara’ out loud. This week’s Friday release is the final piece in our little exploration of the gaps. The same lyrics have now wandered through three completely different musical landscapes, each revealing something slightly different about the spaces between things. This time they arrive wearing oversized front teeth. gapybara is an upbeat, slightly unhinged slice of experimen

At times the most interesting things aren't the objects themselves but the spaces that allow them to exist. A melody is carried as much by silence as by notes. A conversation lives in the pauses between words. Even a jazz pianist spends as much time deciding not to play as choosing the next note. between the gaps grew from that thought. Musically it's built around a restless piano, steady jazz drums and a beautifully understated vocal. The accompanying video follows the same

Between Screen and Stage The upcoming collaboration with Bodies in Flight for their show, Third Nature, has pushed my creative practice into a freshly liminal space. For years, I have been exploring the 'dance' between human intent and machine logic — a process of dependent arising where the most compelling results occur not when we master the technology, but when we allow it to 'glitch' in ways we couldn't predict, or (usually) want. I worked with Bodies in Flight on three

With all the excitement of recent and upcoming releases, complete with some pretty unusuaL visuals, it would be easy to miss today’s quiet landing of a video celebrating Jamune … even though Jamune itself finished only just over a week ago! The upbeat grewve provides the soundtrack to an audio-reactive skip through the visuals of the full 31-day compilation. The visual mash-up is created in TouchDesigner, a constantly morphing multi-box thing I’ve been working on recently - a

Last week’s release was the line. This Friday, the same words return — but they inhabit a very different place. between the gaps takes the lyric somewhere altogether different: piano, jazz, space, and a singer that seems to drift between presence and absence. That idea found its way into the video too. Sometimes the singer is there. Sometimes only the outline where she should be. Sometimes the two almost meet. I’m becoming fascinated by what happens when the words stay the sa

the line is (finally) out! 🎉 sometimes you follow a line. sometimes a line follows you. what started as a mark, a boundary, a distinction … can become a path. or a signal, a noise. or a question. the line has been unfolding for a while now — across sketches, sounds, symbols, and strange recognitions ... halF of an idea ... now it’s finally out in the world. if you’re curious, take a look. listen closely. there may be more in it than first appears. i’d love to know what lands

It's amazing that Jamune is over already! It's been intense, but much fun ... 🎡 For anyone new to halF unusuaL, Jamune has been a month-long, YouTube post-every-day challenge ... following on from the month-long, post-every-day challenge of A-S-May-R, which was over on the Paintbrush ASMR YouTube channel. Every day of ASMayR was taken up, day-by-day, and developed into something more 'musical' (or, at least, sonic beyond more straightforward ASMR) in Jamune - which actually

There’s a point where an idea stops being something you are making and starts becoming something you are listening to. the line began in a simple place — a visual motif from a new logo. An eyes/ears figure. Something halF-symbol, halF-presence … err, halF unusuaL. At first it was just an image: a way of suggesting perception, attention, awareness. They’re also my eye and ears - in all the wrong places - that puts me more personally on the line … But it didn’t stay still as an