I was in double-digits when we recorded it, on VHS. My big sister with the guitar, my younger one with the microphone and tambourine. Me, on the drums feeling awkward and clumsy, self-conscious and unco. At the Trocadero, London in the mid 80’s lip-syncing to Cindi Lauper’s Girls Just Want To Have Fun; the lead song from our favourite movie, as our devoted auntie smiled proudly from the back of the studio.

It was two decades and 155 miles later in a rehab in Weston-Super-Mare my counsellor gifted me my second copy of Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. I still read the pencilled dedication on the inside cover tenderly reminding me the importance of what to keep, whilst honouring the smudges that aren’t ever erased but can be set right.

It was November 2015, day four of the climb that I knew I was undeniably in love. In a tent, warmed in thermals curating a mixtape. At 13,123 ft above sea level, I played it again, The Breach, Dustin Tebbutt. A song that became one of “our songs,” confirmed on the world’s largest free-standing mountain where I witnessed with awe, the curvature of the globe.

It was autumn 2024 when she read it to me. Out loud, with a quiet gentleness and intimacy that reached into me; moved us both. Grounded, crossed legged on the floor. The Velveteen Rabbit. The second time I’d heard it. The first time I deeply understood what it meant to become real.

These experiences of humanness were as much moments of revolution as they are evolution. Experiences of indescribable meaning, memories that changed. Moments that defined.

Although unique to me, we all have them. Collections that aren’t just objects. Possessions that aren’t only material. Cupboards full of things we can’t quite let go of. Spare rooms of stuff that mean too much. Physically, emotionally, symbolically – attached. To what once was, in the hope that it may be, or become something like it was back then. When life was easier, simpler and the cost of letting go didn’t mean losing out. Or it all.

It began with a simple yet profound realisation: the moments we experience, the possessions we collect, the things we work so hard to own aren't just objects—they're repositories of our identity, relationships, and life experiences. When facing the challenge of reducing a collection of 600 CDs to 32 essential-can’t-live-without pieces, the process became powerfully therapeutic and inexplicably transformative.

Each one of those 600 CDs represented a distinct collection of people, places, thoughts and feelings, and the emotional weight of the connections to these experiences within the collection itself. A microcosm of the ecstatic, vulnerable and raw, capturing the historical experiences of humanness that made up my life.

That made up, me.

The selection process from 600 to 32 wasn't about streamlined sentimentality or radical reduction —it wasn’t editing. It was autobiography through the prioritisation of precious, rare memories that defined the narrative of my emotional and social archaeological landscapes.

Backdropped by the music that soundtracked them, each piece is completed with a unique QR coded artistic signature, revealing a 12-track audio playlist exclusively curated for its owner.

This work is the alchemical fusion of music, the immortalisation of memory and the introduction to a language of aesthetic, obsession and legacy.