About

Music and sound never seem to leave Brendan. It has accompanied him through career and life adventures, often only quietening to give a little space for more learning, discovery and experimentation.

It started early; if you look hard enough you can find a cbs records release of his music at age 8. And if you look extremely hard, there’s a 80’s video clip for the same song featuring Duran Duran, Midnight Oil, David Bowie, Elton John among others. Rumors of a finale performance for the Queen at the ‘85 Royal Gala and an audience with the Dalai Lama in Washington a few years later may well be met with uncomfortable deflection from Brendan, but it is all a part of his story.

He mucked around with computer music and sequences from a very young age, lucky to have a home with access to loads of new fangled TRS 80’s and VIC20’s. Tech brain during high school led to him running a public connection to Usenet from a BBS in his bedroom before even Adam had thought of internet access in Australia.

University was a hodgepodge of classical composition, piano, media arts, sound design and finally a crazy couple of years for a masters @ the wonderful Australian Film Television and Radio School. There were bands, hundreds of short films to score and make sound for, then a job as presentation engineer for Supersonic. All this leading to the crazy world of composition and sound projects for film, contemporary dance, museums and installations, running or designing studios, live theatre, opera, commercials.... sometimes home in Sydney and often overseas.

Brendan would become known very quickly for doing the music and audio for projects that had more auditory questions than answers. He was using large speaker count systems before there were any real methods to use them, hacking together solutions as he went. He was building audio media systems to respond to building data in real time prior to any tools being avaliable to help. Circular cinemas. Giant outdoor opera amphitheatres. Museum exhibitions using sound - in spaces not designed for sound. What about a choir of iphones? Contemporary dance scores with abstracted live string quartets. Real time interactive audio was his jam before folk had even thought of unreal engine or object oriented mixing in atmos, Max, or Qlab.

Between all this is his love of the role sound plays with story & ideas. Story is the foundation for the noise in his head. In his world, music and sound are the accompliament to ideas and the world’s narratives. And that makes for a lot of fun sound.