Listen to my latest compositions using the player below.

 

All music is released at ReverbNation under their Music For Good scheme: at least 50% of the profit from the sale of each work is donated to Oxfam.

 

 

 

Visual Art

I've worked with a variety of visual media over the years including: pencil; oils; watercolours; and acrylics. My favourite being watercolour.

 

Over the last few years, and largely becuase of time constraints, I have concentrated my efforts on producing digital media which you'll find on my image site EyeInvent. The digital art I create falls largely into two areas: fictional landscapes and abstract art. My enjoyment is in form, shape, and colour.

 

I am currently working on a project that marries my visual work with words.

 

 

 

Photography

It was a trip to the Welsh mountains in my mid teens that kick-started my love of photography. I had set out with a cheap plastic camera and promised myself that if I came back with some snaps I was happy with, I'd invest in a camera that would allow me to explore the medium further. I was fortunate that the landscape was so powerful that even a novice would return with some great images - I was hooked.

 

I tend not to use a tripod as, for my style of photography, the moment of best light passes so quickly. I often shoot into the light and enjoy saturated colours and high contrast.

 

You'll find my photographs at EyeInvent.

 

 

 

Writing

 

 

The Burial of Georgio Sánchez

 

The actions of the inhabitants of a small town, Pueblo del Pocito, on the night preceding a funeral mass are inextricably linked to those of the passengers on a bus due to arrive in the town the following morning. The story explores the central themes of desire and deceit as the burial of a stranger, Georgio Sánchez, alters all their lives.

 

The chronologies of events, combined with the characters' recollections of past incidents, create a lyrical evocation of their passions, self-sacrifice, and necessary deceit...

 

 

 

"Highly individual and imaginative…" Michael Berkeley

"Wonderfully written and beautifully poetic…" Bloomsbury

"Written with sensitivity and delicacy…" Flambard Press

"Full of marvelous things…" Martin Secker and Warburg

"Bold and innovative…" Picador

 

Buy and read as an eBook for Kindle today at just US$3.50 from any of the following sites [only in English]:

 

Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.de | Amazon.fr | Amazon.es | Amazon.it

 

Read on PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone & multiple Kindle devices.

 

Download the Kindle Reader freely for PC or Mac.

 

Poetry AND PROSE

 

It has always been the same for me - I have a burning need to share, but perhaps at times I do so far too quickly, and with such intensity, I distance those I wish to be most close...

 

An example of my prose follows below, but first, a picture and two poems...

In This Uncertain Land

 

 

This tree,
Alone,
In rippled water stands,
Under sky of blue,
Hold firm your ground on this uncertain land.

The lush of green and vibrant life,
In rain and shine, in sun and snow,
The rush of wind in dark and chill of night,
Under moonlit, pinprick starlight glow.

This tree,
Apart,
On borderland of brush and moss,
On forest edge where fawn and foal in friendship cross.

And then one evening as the ember of the sun departs,
At dusk, a bird unknown arrives,
Her song as sweetest music to the heart,
Her flight, a dance of beauty settles light,
Her soft and gentle wings to rest.

And from that moment on,
Each week,
When bird would come to sing and soar upon the wing,
The tree felt boundless happiness,
Quietly,
Deep and overwhelmingly within.

Under sky of blue,
With scent of pine cone fresh,
On softest breeze of landscape rare,
Bird sings upon a weightless branch,
Her songs fill far and wide this cherished air.

This place,
Once more alone,
In rippled water stand,
Under sky of vivid hue,
Hold close my life in this uncertain land.

 

 

October 2012

 

Kite

 

By causeway ruffed with reeds
Below stone circle windowed space,
Sifting sights in syllables of touch you taste.
Your one hand to the other grasp
The weathered chair with wondered soul
In sight of sail
Across the inlet water fresh
In take of air
As red against the blue below
Shifts as one with swaying corn
On land that rises to the east,
That swells as to a single figure small
As speck upon a sea of ice,
As mizzenmast in ocean squall I stand,
Fists tight around the hilt,
Listing back against the wrench of wind,
Taut the tendril slices clean the air
As paper cuts the softened skin within
Sun strikes the canvas high
Whilst shadow on the earth dilates,
A pool of weighted soil dark,
The strand of fluid mooring brakes
Crisp upon the ears.

 

The Slate Roof

 

The thud of his heel hit the bark, walnuts rained on the reddened tiles skipping taught across the oven earth. He looked on as the crop scattered outward, the sound pricking his skin into motion. Picking up two of the fallen fruits, he cupped them in a single palm and snapped them hard with his hands, one to the other.

It was dusk, a time of deepening blue, of breathing the humid fragrance of newly hown fields, of voices ebbing in and out of the silence. He felt more than thought, listened to the mellow nonsense that meant more than thought and then, gathering up the walnuts into his willow basket, he turned towards the open door. As the farmer walked, the warm glow of fire rushed through, then around him, the door closed, evening spread as light billowed outward from tiny cracks in the slate roof.

Once, time upon time he thought to himself, along the bridleway, over the bridge, across the meadow. After many years of struggle his thoughts had led to one conclusion and from that point the farmer had thought no more and came only to feel.

 

 

Music : Selected Discography

I first started playing the piano when I was six. Every morning I walked to my school with my aunt who taught there. She encouraged me to practice and has continued to support me in my creative activites ever since. I have composed for voice, piano, four piece bands, and orchestra.

 

My recent compositions are personal, intimate works full with fire, rhythm and emotion.

 

A taster of my work as a composer and musician follows below. All music was recorded in my studio and is under copyright.

 

 

Burn Bright this Night

 

The new instrumental work Burn Bright this Night is released at ReverbNation under their Music For Good scheme. At least 50% of the profit from the sale of each download (more if the purchaser wishes) will be donated to Oxfam.

 

 

THE JOURNEY HOME

 

Composed and Performed by Mike de Sousa

 

Composed in 2013, The Journey Home marks my return to full throated music composition. This brief piece for solo piano begins with a fragmented expression of disorientation before continuing its increasingly passionate path towards a final resolution. As with any work I create, I am motivated by its potential to become something of significance to the person experiencing it. If a work touches its audience, either emotionally, intellectually or aesthetically (the three areas that I consider are at the root of us), a work has value. If it fails it is of less worth than a single falling snowflake in some forgotten corner of the world...

A Silent Movie

 

Composed and Performed by Mike de Sousa, Tenor Sax: Mick Perry.

 

The main theme to A Silent Movie has been released at ReverbNation.

 

"I like the style of your writing, it is unlike anything I have ever read..." Alan Bennett

"Good luck, I hope this work gets the wide exposure it deserves..." Malcolm Bradbury

 

A Silent Movie, a complex and personal work, was composed between 1986 and 1988, runs to forty minutes, and is read and heard concurrently.

 

My creative development by 1987 had led me to increasingly include written text as an integral part of my musical output. In 1988 I decided to embark on a work which would be ambitious in both content and style.

 

A Silent Movie contains a broad range of musical forms from acapello singing, jazz, classical, and spoken word, to the musical use of ambient sounds. A Silent Movie was to become the first 'audiotexs', and was technically very demanding as the advent of affordable digital audio had not yet arrived (all sound material was cut and pasted using traditional magnetic media technology).

 

A Silent Movie runs to forty minutes and is read and heard concurrently. Below is a short extract from the text of A Silent Movie, which appears towards the final stages of the work. A number of themes appear in this extract that are developed throughout the work: the life cycle, human cloning, and aesthetics.

 

Poetic Extract from A Silent Movie

 

A nail lies rusting by a sea red with sunset,
In quick corrosion it grasps a last gasp of life,
A brittle end to one so firmly struck.

 

Growing close to this infectious ruin
Red mangrove swells the brackish borderland,
An arc of tangled fingers clinging to the sodden sand.

 

Caught between arthritic joints
A bed of leaf, grass and shells,
And on this nest, remote decay,
A pure glass marble lay.

 

Soft and fixed
Peering through this fish eye lens of crystal,
An infant's iris flexed to breaking point,
Guzzles all sight of misproportioned image,
Hauled into a black hole of sensation.
A small newborn hand reaches down
And from a woollen pocket pulls
A single seedless grape.

 

Sand and Rain

 

Composed and Performed by Mike de Sousa

 

Sand and Rain starts with a Moorish piano solo before developing into a fully fledged Latin instrumental.

 

Sand represents my love of heat, journeying, and distant cultures, the place my heart is most at home, while Rain represents the Northern European culture of my birthplace, the place my mind is most at ease.

 

Sand and Rain was composed and recorded in the mid 1990's. The pianist, composer, and improviser Keith Jarrett, has been a major musical influence in my musical output and the opening section of Sand and Rain is a homage to him. Sand and Rain makes reference to the musical traditions of north Africa, Latin America, and Europe, and by so doing, reflects my own eclectic musical tastes:

Listen Up

 

Composed and Performed by Mike de Sousa

 

Listen Up was composed in an intense period of musical creativity when I laid hands on a powerful music sequencer for the first time in the late 1980's. My main goal was to create music using computer software which maintained the human touch and feel of swing. The challenge was to use the tools of technology to encourage, not disable instinct.

 

Extract:

On The West Side

 

Composed and Performed by Mike de Sousa

 

This digital recording of On The West Side, was recorded during 1993, when digital technology first became widely available as an affordable option for musicians and composers:

My Family

 

Composed and Performed by Mike de Sousa.

 

Songwriting is an instinctive process. Music and words develop hand in hand, one expression feeds the other. My Family was written as a remembrance of times past. The song is about me as a young boy and reflects the confusion and contradictions of a young person's experience of family.

 

Extract:

Our Town

 

Composed and Performed by Mike de Sousa Full Credits

 

Our Town was a community arts project that ran throughout the year 2000 and consisted of: the exhibition Our Town, My Space; the Our Town 'audiotexs'; and the Our Town booklet.

 

Review the full list of credits for Our Town

 

The following three tracks are taken from the music composition element of the arts project. An audiotexs is an audio recording of music, speech, and ambient sounds forming an integrated whole and where all elements are treated musically.

 

I began work on the audiotexs Our Town in December 1997. Over the following two years I interviewed hundreds of people for the project, and made thousands of ambient sound recordings. Our Town is a four movement work which runs to seventy minutes.

 

From infancy to old age, bankers and beekepers, mothers and fathers, rich, poor, happy, angry, sad. All are part of Our Town. Some tell of their passions, of those who have left and indelible mark on their lives, others of their journey as it nears its end. From morning to night, through sun, wind and rain, through every season of the year, you will hear sounds from familiar and unexplored places.

 

Our Town Opening (extended extract):


Not So Long Ago (extract):


Where I Want To Be:


Full Circle (extended extract):