Home

Music

I've been composing music for a long time, since I started playing the piano aged 7.

As well as the bands EMDY (2024 - present) and Sub Machine (2017 - 2024), mentioned elsewhere, here are some other excerpts ...

The Feral 3

Demo: A Crashing Wave to Free the Slaves of Wasted Days (2017)

The Feral 3 were a short lived trio (2016-17), which morphed into the duo of Sub Machine. The Feral 3 were Mark Day on vocals, keys and guitar; Dan Johnston on drums; Nick Mather on bass. Some of the songs became Sub Machine songs. A couple that didn't are linked to below:

Bone Rain

EP: Bone Rain (1995)

My Uni band was a Christian Folk/ Funk/ Prog outfit called Bone Rain. Despite having all that going against us, I still stand by the song writing.

The Cheater

In the late 90s I was discovering electronic music, writing parts of songs and never finishing them - a problem that dogged me for many years. I called myself 'The Cheater' - I can't remember why now, and I don't think I told anyone else that this was my artist name - until now. Here are some of the songs that never got finished or cleaned up; most of the playing will have been all in the first take, and not touched after that. But I like listening back to it - there's a rawness and joy in some of these songs that I'm really happy with.

The Unrepeatable and the Magnificent

Anger and Sadness

Down the Hole

Breakbeat 98 Part 1

Breakbeat 98 Part 2

Live Slowly

Other Miscellaneous Music

Music for contemporary theatre

Between 2005 and 2013, I wrote music and designed sound for some really fun immersive theatre experiences, directed by my sister Katie Day for her theatre company The Other Way Works. The best, musically, I think is this dreamlike/ hallucinagenic audio tour of Lightwoods Park in Birmingham, created in 2013.

For a while, I put on workshops in using audio looping to create sonic landscapes for contemporary theatre. To support the workshops, I wrote a handbook to audio looping, which you can view here.

Worship Music

In 1997 and 1998 I was a worship leader at a Christian youth camp called Lee Abbey, in Devon UK. Although I'm no longer a Christian I can look back and appreciate what an amazing time it was, with an amazing group of people. I wrote a few worship songs as part of that: here's one.

A-Level Music

This is one of my compositions submitted for my A-Level music. I was always proud of this one, an arrangement of the poem 'Anthem for Doomed Youth'. I only found out halfway through writing it that Benjamin Britten had already set the same poem to music, and I refused to listen to Britten's until I had finished mine. Probably a good move: they are completely different. The performance does let the song down slightly - mostly my fault, as I ended up singing the main part, and a trained classical singer I was not.

Elixir Vitae

And right back to my very first band, the 80s hair rock wannabes Elixir Vitae. I was invited to join the band by an older kid I knew, which was very exciting. I think I probably ruined their sound by playing synth-strings and piano all over their metal riffs.