Part 2

What is the relationship between harmony, rhythm and melody? How do non-percussion instruments contribute to the overall rhythmic texture of a piece?

As I do a lot of travelling for gigs, one of the flights I take most often is from Sydney to Melbourne.

It’s only just over an hour, but each trip always has different turbulence, and that makes me think a lot about the relationship between harmony, rhythm, and melody. There’s hardly ever a completely smooth flight. At some point, whether it’s during take-off, pushing through the clouds, or just before landing, there are always interesting bumps along the way.

I feel like harmony, rhythm, and melody are similar. They are so different in nature, but they have to work together. It’s like flying an airplane steadily through winds and clouds. Sometimes I hear harmony as beds of clouds: it interacts with the drumming, interrupts it, and offers new ideas. And melody, for me, is always about motion, it keeps moving forward no matter what.

Another way I think about it is through my limbs. For me, when I drop three limbs in unison, that feels like one harmony, almost like playing a C major chord. But if I decide to play my left hand right after my right hand, that can create the feeling of a minor second. Each subtle change in spacing or timing creates a new kind of “harmony” within the rhythm itself.

I also create melody through the drums. Sometimes, a specific tuning of the drums or certain rhythmic repetition on my left hand helps me to find a melody to attach myself to.

I think the relationship between harmony, rhythm, and melody is very close, complex, and ever-changing.

Do you feel that honing your compositional / songwriting skills has an effect on your drumming skills?

Yes, absolutely, and also vice versa. My compositional skills have affected my drumming, and my drumming has affected the way I compose.

I’ve always been interested in writing music, but for a long time I felt I didn’t have enough skill to properly put my ideas into written form. Something that’s been exciting for me is realising that traditional notation isn’t the only way to document my compositional ideas.

A lot of my compositional ideas actually come from drum improvisation. For example, after my 100-hour duration performance, I came away thinking: I need to stop listening to just myself for a while. The instrument I wanted to hear instead was the double bass, and not just one, but four or six of them all playing together. That thought led me to write a piece called Music for Six Double Bassists (2023).

Another time, I realised that my improvisational ideas were popping all across the musical range, sound, and timbre, almost like popcorn. So, I wrote a piece called Music for 50 Musicians (2024). Then this year, in 2025, I have been dedicating each month to writing new music for different groups of musicians and instruments such as bassoon and carillon.  

I’ve also been lucky to write for classical chamber ensembles this year, which was a whole other level of challenge. Having to pay attention to every single detail in that context taught me to expand my capacity to pay attention to detail in my drumming as well.

So yes — composition and drumming constantly inform and shape each other for me.

I've long been intrigued by bands or ensembles where the drummer is the leader and/or main composer. In as far as it is possible to generalise, what do you think changes in terms of the music or performance in these situations?

I don’t think I can really tell the difference when the leader of an ensemble is a drummer compared to another instrumentalist.

In the jazz and improvised music settings I play in, the music is shaped in the moment, and most of the time every band member contributes their own instrumental knowledge and experience in real time.

Because of that, the leadership role doesn’t feel tied to one instrument. It feels more collective.

How are you making use of the timbral and textural potentials/possibilities of your drums and percussion instruments when making music?

I’ve come to think of my drum kit as offering a wide range of note characters.

When I say “character,” I’m often thinking about texture — the roughness or smoothness of the sound. It can be as clean and polished as a small rock that’s been sanded over millions of years, or as rough and gritty as an asphalt road. Different drum surfaces, cymbals, and types of sticks all create different shades of these timbres, and I love experimenting with that.

Some of my favourite sounds include scraping or bowing the cymbals to create whale-like tones or eerie sounds, like a creepy door opening in a horror film. There’s also a helicopter-like sound I can produce on the floor tom, and one of my favourite motions is setting up two cymbals very close together — so that when I strike one, the other gets hit by accident, creating these indeterminate rhythms and textures.

Over time I’ve built up a wide vocabulary of timbres and textures on the kit, and I’m excited to keep building on this language across my lifetime.

How has technology, such as drum machines and sequencers, impacted the way rhythm is created and perceived? Has it been a concrete influence on your own approach?

I think technology like drum machines and trigger device are so cool and creates vast range of rhythms, patterns, and sounds. I love the precision and consistency they offer.

But so far, I’ve intentionally chosen not to add any technological gear to my drum setup. The biggest reason is because I’m pretty bad at learning new things when it comes to technological devices, but it’s definitely something I’d like to explore later.

I also want to first see if I can replicate those rhythms and sounds myself, acoustically, with my body. Knowing my own tendencies, if I could just press a button and instantly create a flawless rhythmic loop or a bank of cool sounds, I might overlook the areas where my existing drumming language could actually grow and adapt to that space.

Physical strain is a particularly serious issue for many drummers. How does it manifest itself, how do you deal with it and in how far does it affect your creativity?

In terms of physical strain, I want to connect this to what I mentioned earlier about working on the bounce–gather technique. Once I understood how to apply that properly, it became life-saving for me.

When I was younger, I was close to struggling with RSI, but after adopting this approach, I realised I no longer experienced pain when I played. Because of that, I now feel free to practice and perform for as long as I want without worrying about injury. For me, the only difficult or physically demanding part is actually moving the drum kit around!

Many recording engineers have remarked that the drums can be particularly hard to capture. What makes drums sound great on record and in a live setting?

For me, what makes drums sound great, whether on record or in a live setting, really comes down to the strike of the drumstick, that exact moment when it hits the surface. I believe that moment determines the quality of sound.

Playing the drums isn’t just about hitting the surface. It’s about knowing how to activate the entire body of the drum, the resonant space of the instrument.

I also think a lot about volume control across all four limbs, and about the imaginative possibilities of how one drum or cymbal can be played in countless different ways. For example, I’ll spend a long time experimenting on just a single cymbal: striking the bell, the surface, the edge, and then ten different spots in between those three spots, each one producing its own timbre.

I think those kinds of experiments really benefited me in recording sessions, because a lot of engineers have told me they didn’t need to change much to the sound I was already producing. That feedback encouraged me to trust my own process and keep developing my timbral vocabulary.

Drums and percussion are remarkably often used for physical therapy / healing. What, from your point of view, makes them particularly suitable tools for this?

One of my favourite features of the drums is how quietly the instrument can be played. Drums are often thought of as the noisiest instruments, but when they enter the quiet range, they can get so soft (just before silence) that they draw the ears into every subtle detail.

You begin to notice the tiny timbral variations on the cymbals, the slight overtones and lingering resonance, the on-and-off motion of the fingers on the drumsticks, even the faint vibrations of the sticks themselves. For me, this is like the sound of a pencil writing on paper that is audible only in an almost silent environment.

From a rhythmic perspective, the repetition of patterns with small, accumulative changes also has a powerful effect. I experienced this very clearly during my 100-hour performance across 10 consecutive days. On the first day, I tried to improvise with many different concepts, but by the third hour I had already run out of new ideas. That led me to sit with a single idea for a much longer duration, making only gradual changes.

What I found was that my concentration deepened, and I began focusing on and celebrating every small detail. That, to me, felt like a healing experience.