The music I compose is in some ways a battle between two kinds of music. Although both would be described as atonal, one is more expressive and colouristic with pronounced harmonic references, the other, monolithic and atavistic in its extremes of register, colour and form. The confrontation between these two musics results in a fusion that engenders a personal approach to structure, colour, timbre and dialectic. This fusion can be seen as the working out of two strands of musical thought filtered through transformations that originate in the techniques of abstract painting. The rules of this fusion and transformation may elude the listener somewhat, but the resultant drama, be it passive or active, should be direct and communicative.

The genesis of this compositional approach stems from two main areas. Firstly, my initial experiences with music which fell between the warm nostalgia of the English Pastoral School, with composers such as Vaughan Williams, Bax and Moeran making a large emotional impression, and its diametric opposite, my excitement with the avant-garde expressionism and experimentalism of the 60s and 70s. Secondly, being a landscape painter, my work with colour, form and texture impacted directly on my thoughts about the construction and content of music. As my painting developed away from the representational into the abstract and my repertoire of techniques grew, so did my conviction that I could develop a personal compositional language by exploring these techniques in a musical context. Now, both musical threads are transformed through my ..painterly ear.. to assimilate what feels like a personal, natural and unselfconscious outpouring of sound.

It is worth mentioning this genesis, as on first hearing, my music may sound arbitrary, improvisational and sometimes chaotic. This is not the case. It is clear that the music does not operate within the logic of number series, motivic development, Fibonacci-based
proportions, functional harmony, magic squares, tone rows or any of the usual gamete of compositional techniques. There is another kind of logic at work, a personal logic that has its roots in my experience of the techniques and processes of abstract painting. This compositional logic originates from inside the music itself rather than being imposed from the outside upon it. The surface of the music - what you hear - reflects the many processes, some systematic, some intuitive, that have gone into its creation. This surface is the music; its own context, self fulfilling and delighting in the visceral nature and quality of
sound for sounds sake in the same way an artist can relish a particular combination of colours or surfaces as complete in itself. In my work, the relationship between musical objects is the result of a constant process of assimilation where the inherent energies
and context of sound objects dictate the destiny and role that each inhabit and exhibit. In short, the sum of the parts influences the outcome of the whole. This is the nature of my music - the sound of it .. and it is the guiding principle for its realisation.

Many of my new pieces use a combination of acoustic recordings alongside multi-tracking, sound manipulations, digital sound samples and digitally originated sounds. In bringing together this array of sounds with acoustic instruments I am able to create new works that explore fresh sound-worlds and unique instrumental combinations.

For working, I use Logic Pro 7.1(2) on a Mac Pro, which holds 8Gb of RAM. Formally I worked on a Mac G5 but the processing and RAM capacity became restrictive for handling the vast amounts of number crunching that was needed to operate some of the software. Among the sound sample libraries I have, I use is the very excellent Vienna Symphonic Library with its unique performance interface. The VSL library is held on several external hard drives. I input musical material into Logic either via the mouse of a digital keyboard
and create music by constructing many polyphonic lines, rather like bands of strata in a huge cliff face, to use a geological analogy, and then erode through these layers to expose the simplicity of a single band of music or allow the full density of all the textures to ..sound through... There..s more to it than that of course, the process of creating music includes many simple and complex activities and techniques, which vary from piece to piece depending upon what it is I want to achieve.

Many new works of mine are assimilated from existing pieces of music. I am fascinated by the recycling of material and how, by changing musical contexts and relationships of pitch and duration, one can transform familiar material into something quite new. For instance, works that were originally solo or duo pieces have been segmented and reorganised, expanded both vertically and horizontally through multi-tracking and transformation techniques and cast into a digital sound environment that has evolved from the pitch and durational properties of the original material. New ..organic.. digital sounds have also been
originated to enhance this music, expand its colouristic and expressive possibilities and add power and depth.

Working with ..live.. sound on the Mac is rather like sculpting in sound .. you can assimilate your work as you go along and hear exactly how it is developing. Before using computers I would write music from my head, which is the traditional and popularly imagined way that a composer should work. It is also a perfectly satisfactory way to work. However, with my
experience of new musical technologies, I found that my compositional methods and way of working complimented the approach necessary to use music software and a new marriage was created that felt natural and full of potential. I also found that I could work quickly and felt in control of more of the elements that go into the creation of a finished piece of music. Indeed, for the first time I had freedoms to create whatever nature of music I wanted, whatever length, whatever whacky combinations of instruments, anything, without recourse to practicalities or other external inhibiting factors preventing my ideas from being realised. Freedom and potential felt great and I am still on that journey of discovery as I become increasingly familiar with the possibilities of the software I am working with.

Music created using these methods is not generally designed for live performance (although I have written pieces than combine the use of pre-recorded and live elements) nor are they designed for acoustic
performance .. there is no written score as such, all the work is produced in the matrix editor of Logic Pro, although I do conventionally notate the music for the live performers to play from or to record live strands into the digital sound environment .. the pieces are designed for music listening at home or on a portable music player in the same way that any other piece of recorded music is listened to and enjoyed. Like a radio play that is a non-staged dramatic work, these new pieces are non-live performance musical
works. The performances of the musical material produced by any featured musicians are real enough and recorded live in the usual manner, but the processes that these sounds undergo and the sound environments that they are combined with are conceived and
engineered in my studio and created using the processes of assimilation previously mentioned that are common to my painting and compositions. The experience of listening to recorded music is now widespread. Most people..s daily experience of music is
via CD or mp3 and music downloads and it is to these listeners that I address my new work. I see music designed explicitly for CD listening as a new genre of music that straddles the worlds of live concert and theatre performance and electro-acoustic / digital studio produced music. In these recordings I endeavor to create the feeling of ..live.. music by combining acoustic recordings with a flexible array of digital sound manipulation and creation techniques, all engineered so that my musical intention is presented to the public in an easily accessible recorded format.

And this interaction with the public is perhaps one of the most exciting possibilities of new music technologies wedded to the Internet.

Any artist who produces work on the edge, away from the populist mainstream .. in any media .. will know how the dumbing-down of arts in recent years has made it increasingly difficult to bring new work to public attention. There are many reasons for this; funding,
attitudes to new work, lack of risk taking built into programming policy, the cult of the celebrity often obscuring the valuable work of other artists, the costs of initiating new projects, the tastes and values of programmers and managers .. the list goes on, but the result is the same; it is very difficult, and in some circumstances impossible to bring the wide range of fantastic new work being produced in the UK into the public arena.
Of course, the Internet has helped a great deal with this as many new opportunities have opened up here.

As an abstract contemporary composer and painter, all the above inhibiting factors are present as part of daily life and it became clear to me that to bring my work into the public domain I had to find a new way forwards for my work to be created and disseminated.
Living as I do in a very isolated rural area (the Isle of Skye off the west coast of Scotland), I do not have the usual networking opportunities that composers living in the centers of population would have, and this isolation has a direct effect upon the
development of performance and commissioning opportunities.

I realised that by creating work in a digital format and then using the internet to advertise and disseminate my work, a whole new world of possibilities would open up for me. To this end I am currently developing my website (www.marc-yeats.co.uk) to enable the download of my work directly onto people..s home computers, thus bypassing all of the difficulties mentioned above. I would dearly love to have all the acoustic performances I want, but as that is not a possibility at this time, enabling the public to interface and download my work via the World Wide Web offers the best way forwards. I find these new possibilities very exciting.

Living and working in an isolated area has its drawbacks, some of which have been mentioned above, but for me, there are also great benefits.

Isolation allows me to develop my work away from the work of others. I say this as I feel that concentrating and focusing on what you do as an artist, without recourse to direct or indirect external influences is of great developmental benefit. I feel that this isolation helps one achieve a greater degree of individuality and intensity within the work, as by necessity, a great deal of self-development and professional practice is self-referential. This isn..t to say that I am oblivious to external influences and inspiration, as I am not, but it does protect from being bombarded by the latest trends and fads and enables the time and space for focused contemplation on one..s own artistic priorities and intentions.

Living on Skye is certainly an inspiration, though not in the way that people often think. The romantic notion is that being an artist and composer, one wants to recapture the landscape in sound and music in a representational way .. i.e. you paint what you see because it..s so beautiful, or write music about the landscape in a romantic and sentimental way. It doesn..t work like that for me. The landscape is a huge inspiration, as is the rawness of the elements, but I am more inspired by the energies and ambience of the place, the geological structures, the biological interactions and vast openness and changing fractal
and chaos theories that one witnesses in the ever-changing skies and sea-scapes. My starting point is my local environment, that is where my roots are, but the creative issues and inspirations that I am working with are of a more universal nature. This manifests to such an extent that the points of origin in my work, form an inspirational perspective, can be quite obscure, at least from the perspective of the listener of the viewer, but they are there, never-the-less.

New technologies have also begun to take hold and influence my visual works. Earlier this year I developed a series of 31 limited edition digital prints. Again using my Mac with Photoshop CS2. These prints were designed for sale through my website, again to give me access to the very widest public and help overcome some of the issues of geographical
isolation.

These original prints are created by focusing on very small areas found in a number of my larger oil paintings. The images are captured and developed through processes that explore and enhance colour and texture, discovering new worlds and abstract forms
that exist in the smallest details of much larger works. Many of these images hint at the natural world, organic material, crystalline structures, light, atmosphere and weather, as well as entirely new landscapes.

As the images originate from my oil paintings, they bring with them the brush-strokes, mark-making and textures that are inherent in that oil painting. This textural element brings animation and depth to the images as well as creating highly detailed, rich and
colourful surfaces.

The images exist only in print form and are designed specifically for this purpose .. there is no original painting that exists in the same form as the print .. the images are not reproductions of paintings but complete, unique works in their own right.

To create these images I use up to 30 different processes in Photoshop. I work with these processes .. play with them and experiment .. until I arrive at an image that I find satisfying. It is true to say that I have learnt a great deal through mistakes that I have
made whilst experimenting. These mistakes have thrown up new possibilities that I had not anticipated and where these mistakes revealed valuable results, I assimilated them into my technique.

It is also true to say that my experience and experimentation with this digital media has directly influenced the way that I think about painting. The next series of oil paintings that I produce will incorporate a number of these techniques, not to the extent of the process, as liquid oil paints handle very differently to digital pixels, but the end result
- the surface of the work .. that will directly reflect the results that I have discovered through my experience with digital media.

I believe that digital media is a wonderful tool offering huge developmental opportunities. This new media overcomes many of the boundaries and inhibiting factors common to all artists whilst putting great power and self determination back into the hands of the artist themselves to create with vision and enthusiasm as well as overcome issues of geographical and stylistic isolation.