Sound-timbre-silence provides an apt jumping off point for talking both about my approach to composition and a broader analytical approach to puzzling out contemporary music. Increasingly, I have deployed these three musical elements not in isolation to one another, but as aspects of a larger, multi-dimensional musical shape. This talk will dive into this approach, building on analysis of new music from the UK and abroad to situate this practice within wider trends in contemporary composition, including algorithmic music, spectralism, (meta)modernism and structuralism . Musical discussion will focus on the recent pieces Gravity, for string quartet, Silicon, for orchestra and electronics, and Warp for piano and orchestra.