Listen to my latest compositions using the player below:

All music composed, performed and produced by Mike de Sousa.

Read one idea each day limited to five lines. I often speak of beauty and love.

The first part of this work, Think This Today, is a reverse journal that first appeared on the website of the same name where a single thought is presented for each day over a three year period. Reversing the order encourages me to think of time, my place, and action within it.

The second part and title of this publication With and Alone is a thematic presentation of the same thoughts that allow the reader to quickly locate and consider related ideas.

The way I read, the context I read, changes how I read and come to understand.

Thematic Index

Art · Beauty · Fragility · Happiness · Hope · Human Relationships · Identity · Language · Loss · Love · Making · Money · Music · Mystery · Nature · Peace · Place · Poetry · Politics and Power · Sadness · The Future Now · The Good Life · Time · Within

With And Alone is available as a free eBook.

Art connects us through time, place, and perhaps most importantly, through our differences. Through difference, art encourages tolerance and understanding, and provides a landscape for peace to flourish.

I write about the nature of art and its practice, with sections on music, dance, visual art, and more.

Topics include: Design, Illustration, and Art; The Art of Heart and Mind; Performance Art · Recorded Art; Art and Literature; Sound And Music; When Dance Becomes Art; Sculpture, Ceramic Art; Photography And The Still Image; Why Poetry?; Film As Art; Digital Art and AI; What Art Can and Cannot Do; Emotion and Art; Short Definitions of Art; Mathematics and Art; Art And Ownership; Politics and Art; Obsession and the Artist; The Business of Art · Acts of Love; Consensus and the Limitations of Great Art; A Critical View of Conceptual Art; What Art Is · What Art Is Not.

Visit The Craft of Art

The actions of the inhabitants of a small town, Pueblo del Pocito, on the night preceding a funeral mass are inextricably linked to those of the passengers on a bus due to arrive in the town the following morning. The story explores the central themes of desire and deceit as the burial of a stranger, Georgio Sánchez, alters all their lives.

The chronologies of events, combined with the characters' recollections of past incidents, create a lyrical evocation of their passions, self-sacrifice, and necessary deceit...

"Highly individual and imaginative…" Michael Berkeley

"Wonderfully written and beautifully poetic…" Bloomsbury

"Written with sensitivity and delicacy…" Flambard Press

"Full of marvelous things…" Martin Secker and Warburg

"Bold and innovative…" Picador

The Burial of Georgio Sánchez is available as a free eBook.

A short poetic story and picture book for children and adults.

A non-threatening and positive story about the environment and renewable energy that can be enjoyed by all ages.

The Sun Shines has two parts.

The first presents the story with images and supports young readers in its choice of typeface and presentation. The pictures invite thought and dialog about the narrative as it unfolds.

The second part presents the story in text form as a poetic fable.

The Sun Shines is available as a free eBook.

Day One

Each day I wake the world as new...

The Sun Shines

The Music 'The Sun Shines' accompanies a short poetic story and picture book for children and adults. A non-threatening and positive tale about the environment and renewable energy that can be enjoyed by all ages.

Enjoy the music together with the story and accompanying images at 100 Artworks.

A Short Lament For A Private Man

For those alone who find themselves surrounded by life, yet unable, unfortunate, or unwilling to welcome its company, I mark their passing with sound and light so they do not fall forever from our view.

A Short Lament For A Private Man at 100 Artworks includes art and further thoughts.

A Silent Movie

Composed and Performed by Mike de Sousa, Tenor Sax: Mick Perry.

A Silent Movie, a complex and personal work, was composed between 1986 and 1988, runs to forty minutes, and is read and heard concurrently.

My creative development by 1987 had led me to increasingly include written text as an integral part of my musical output. In 1988 I decided to embark on a work which would be ambitious in both content and style.

A Silent Movie contains a broad range of musical forms from acapello singing, jazz, classical, and spoken word, to the musical use of ambient sounds. A Silent Movie was to become the first 'audiotexs', and was technically very demanding as the advent of affordable digital audio had not yet arrived (all sound material was cut and pasted using traditional magnetic media technology).

A number of themes appear in this extract that are developed throughout the work: the life cycle, human cloning, and aesthetics.

"I like the style of your writing, it is unlike anything I have ever read..." Alan Bennett

"Good luck, I hope this work gets the wide exposure it deserves..." Malcolm Bradbury

Our Town

Full Circle ~ extract. Full Credits. Listen to the full length piece presented in the player at the top of this page.

I began work on Our Town in December 1997. Over the following two years I interviewed hundreds of people for the project, and made thousands of ambient sound recordings. Our Town is a four movement work which runs to seventy minutes and was completed in the year 2000.

From infancy to old age, bankers and beekepers, mothers and fathers, rich, poor, happy, angry, sad. All are part of Our Town. Some tell of their passions, of those who have left and indelible mark on their lives, others of their journey as it nears its end. From morning to night, through sun, wind and rain, through every season of the year, you will hear sounds from familiar and unexplored places.