Threefold was written for Steven Logan, Luca Manghi and David Kelly in 2025 for their album A Flint & A Spark.

[adjective] a threefold approach to solving a problem

It’s fundamental as part of my joiking practice to respond to the environmental sounds around me as well as internal music. I started writing environmentally based pieces as a method of developing harmonic ideas over a static structure. The idea is something not unlike singing along with one’s dishwasher, or with the subtle but constant humming found in most homes. We surround ourselves with constant noise. Threefold is an attempt to honour these drones and stylise them, to elevate the mundane soundtrack of domestic life into something worthy of sustained attention and aesthetic contemplation.

Let’s consider the dishwasher. It cycles through its programs with a kind of industrial determination, producing a complex wash of white noise punctuated by rhythmic pulses as the spray arms rotate and water pressure shifts. There is a fundamental pitch buried in that mechanical hum, usually hovering somewhere in the lower registers, a cluster of D, E flat and F. It wavers slightly, enriched by overtones and undertones, by the rattle of crockery and the slosh of water against steel. If you sit with it long enough, really listen to it, you begin to hear harmonic possibilities emerging from what initially seems like utilitarian noise.

Listen on Apple Music or Spotify. Score will be available in October from my publisher SOUNZ.