Sophie Hutchings

From her humble beginnings playing piano while nobody else was in the family home, Sydney’s Sophie Hutchings has developed into a composer and performer of unique beauty and international renown. Slowly and quietly, Hutchings wrote a set of pieces that would eventually shape her debut album, Becalmed, a work showing just how she’d blossomed since coming out of the bedroom. Her rolling and fluid style has her pieces curl out with meditative calm, often beguilingly moving into more stirring territories to expand a sense of mood that is not only broadly evocative but clearly from a singular place. It was no surprise that Hutchings’ sense of measure was superbly realised by The Necks’ regular engineer Tim Whitten and after a year of much praise and attention, Becalmed was named in Mojo Magazine’s Top 5 independent releases for 2010. Two years from that point and Hutchings continued to expand her palette with Night Sky, balancing the fragility and urgency at the core of her music with greater command. Hutchings’ bold vision for Night Sky moved her ways with strings, percussion and woodwind as well as her piano playing into a deeper realm that proved irresistible worldwide. While often compared to the likes of Peter Broderick, Nils Frahm and Dustin O’ Halloran, Hutchings has defined her own presence with just three works. Her fourth album is set for release July 2016 through Preservation Records and will be available in CD and digital format along with a special Vinyl edition.