Kit McCarthy

Hi – I'm Kit. I’m a composer and producer from Scotland. I make sounds and scores, often working collaboratively and across disciplines.

I write music about the natural world, landscapes, environments, and echoes, nostalgia, light, memory, time, and also electronics and information and interconnectedness, but also—

—with an element of melting, morphing, sparking, glitching, dissolving, combined with a feeling of homesickness, displacement, recollection, but—

—it’s also faded, and glowing, and careful, but also kinda chaotic and wild and a bit of a scratchy mess, in a way that seems familiar and fragile (like a song you heard a long time ago), but also strange and distant, and sometimes a bit scary, alarming, disconcerting (like a horror film), and sometimes it’s all—

—very balanced and calm (like a radio crackling with white noise), and sometimes it’s almost falling apart, and it’s full of chords that feel just right, except they all seem to belong to different worlds.

I studied composition and electronic music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. I was taught composition by Hollie Harding, Laurence Crane, and Julian Philips, and electronic music by Elif Yalvaç and Ieva Vaiti.

I was generously supported by the Caroline Fitzmaurice Trust, the Cross Trust, and a scholarship from the Guildhall School Trust.

In 2024, I was proud to win Guildhall’s Ian Horsborough Memorial Prize for my orchestral piece, 'The Players Nearest The Fire Exist.'

Kit McCarthy’s tracks

• Molten Kaleidoscope — live from The Octagon Chapel by Kit McCarthy