Sophie Hutchings

Lauded Australian pianist and composer Sophie Hutchings delivers a body of work of spacious, hypnotic beauty.

Rich with emotion and feeling, texture and contrast, as propulsive and powerful as it is elegant and intimate, piano notes flow, pause and surge, variously blending with strings, synths, percussion and field recordings. This is music that unveils itself. Like a universe of secrets.

Sydney-based, she remains an avid surfer. Travelling is a passion: periods spent in India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East have woven golden threads into a sound hailed as "calm in a maddening world" by Clash and "stirring, vigorous, grandly melodic" by MOJO.

As a child, she struggled to sight-read and would come to channel her distinctive musical gifts using instinct, imagination and a system of written-out chord charts, practicing in private on the family piano while her two older brothers were listening to and/or playing in alt-rock bands.

Her jazz-musician father, a multi-instrumentalist, had raised her on a musical diet that generally favoured horn players: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Chet Baker. The young Sophie gravitated to instrumental piano, regardless.

Pieces by the likes of Frédéric Chopin and proto-minimalist Eric Satie are in her muscle memory, nestled alongside such late-teen discoveries as contemporary classical composers Arvo Pärt and Jóhann Jóhannsson American chamber music renegades Rachel’s and iconic Australian improvising trio The Necks