Music

Music to quiet an anxious mind, and the places that inspired it

There's a particular kind of quiet that only certain music can reach. Not silence — silence can be its own kind of loud when your mind is racing. I mean the quiet of a held breath, a slow tide, a room with good light in it. That's the sound I've spent years trying to make.

I create Celtic ambient and neoclassical music from home in Hervey Bay, Queensland, but almost none of it started here. It started in Scotland, where I was born, and in Milford Haven, the Welsh harbour town where I grew up. Every album I've made begins the same way: with a real place, and a real memory of what it felt like to stand in it. I write the story and direction behind every track myself, then bring it to life with the tools I use to produce.

Why calm music actually helps

When anxiety takes hold, your body often reacts before your mind catches up — breath shortens, thoughts speed up, everything feels urgent even when nothing actually is. Slow, spacious, largely wordless music does something useful here: it gives your nervous system a tempo to borrow. No lyrics demanding attention, no sudden shifts to brace for. Just a steady, unhurried pace that your breathing can quietly fall into step with.

That's not a promise that music fixes anxiety — it doesn't, and I'd never claim it does. But a lot of people tell me they put on an album while reading, working, or simply trying to get through a hard hour, and it gives their mind somewhere calmer to land. That's always been the aim.

Where the songs actually come from

"Where Voices Remember," the album, takes its title from a feeling more than a place — the way certain voices, once heard, seem to stay lodged somewhere in you. "Hiraeth," one of its tracks, borrows a Welsh word with no direct English equivalent: a longing for a home, or a person, or a version of somewhere that may not fully exist to return to anymore.

"Milford," the second album, is a more literal homecoming. It's a tribute to Milford Haven — one of the deepest natural harbours in the world — and the town on its edge where I grew up: the tugs, the working boats, the fisherman statue on the Rath overlooking the haven. "Tribute to the Fisherman" was made for that statue specifically, built by a Milford neighbour, standing watch over the water the way it always has.

"No Words Required" is exactly what it sounds like — instrumental pieces built for reading, resting, and long horizons, with nothing to interpret and nothing asking anything of you.

If you'd like somewhere to start

You don't need to know the backstory of a piece for it to help you slow down. But if it's useful: start with something with space in it — a long, unhurried track, played somewhere quiet, with nothing else demanding your attention for a few minutes. Let it do its work in the background rather than analysing it. That's when it tends to help most.