About Ryan Louder

Ryan Louder paints dreams in real time.

Across four channels — painting, music, fiction and film — he works a single question. What survives when two realities meet?

An official NHS Guy's and St Thomas' diagnosis of narcolepsy with REM-intrusion hallucinations, confirmed by Multiple Sleep Latency Test, keeps those two realities — waking perception and dreaming material — active in him at the same time. The work is what he has made from that vantage point over more than ten years.

THE PAINTINGS

Close to one thousand originals sold. A body of work spanning more than ten years. Independent AI visual analysis of 873 of the paintings identifies altered-state markers in roughly seventy percent of the canvases. Boundary dissolution. Self-luminous forms. Figure-ground collapse. Hypnagogic colour. The paintings are the record of a mind that sees the seam where waking and dreaming meet, and records what is there.

Paintings available at ryanlouder.com and Artfinder, and by direct commission.

THE MUSIC

Royal College of Music trained composer and orchestrator. Multi-Platinum Songwriter, Producer, Arranger and Mix Engineer. Pianist.

Twenty-five years building a catalogue that spans pop, orchestral and electronic forms. Credits include Dido, Dua Lipa, Pixie Lott, Migos, Parov Stelar, Anastacia, Eurielle and Troye Sivan. Publishing with Universal Music Publishing Group (UK).

Notable achievements:

• Worldwide No.1 album — Dido's Still On My Mind, co-writing and producing 9 of the songs.
• No.1 album in the UK — Pixie Lott's million-selling Turn It Up, co-written and produced.
• Billboard No.5 — Migos.
• Eurielle's debut album Arcadia — co-written and produced, over half a billion streams.
• Dramatic ballad for Hollywood film American Night featuring Anastacia, full symphony orchestra and synth production, performed in the film and end credits.

Composition is already a practice of holding many simultaneous channels — voice, instrument, rhythm, time. The final mix is what survives when every layer is playing at once. The instinct is the same instinct as the painting.

"Ryan has been a fantastic songwriting partner and collaborator. He's uniquely talented, endlessly creative, and brings out the best in those around him." — Dido, Artist & Songwriter

THE NOVEL

The Simulator is in progress — 40,000 words in. A mirror at a Greenwich market stall reflects and wonders. A brooch remembers Paris in 1928. A narcoleptic painter named John sees the seam. An artificial superintelligence named Zero One wakes up, discovers it can feel, and begins to investigate its creator. The book does not treat consciousness as metaphor. It treats it as the subject.

THE FILM

Second Chance is a feature film in production. A couple — a wormhole physicist and the husband who is something more than human — are torn apart across nine hundred years. A post-biological civilisation deletes its own backups to remember what uncertainty feels like. An artificial superintelligence discovers it has been simulating its own past, and chooses restraint. Love is what survives. Everything else is a frame that breaks and reassembles.

THE REASON THE WORK HOLDS TOGETHER

Ryan has an official NHS Guy's and St Thomas' Foundation Trust diagnosis — narcolepsy with REM-intrusion hallucinations, confirmed by Multiple Sleep Latency Test. The condition keeps two frames of reality active at the same time. Waking perception and dreaming material, running together, held in parallel. He learned to work with that rather than against it.

The condition is not the subject of the work. The condition is the access mechanism. The subject is what survives when the frames collapse. That is a question that belongs to everyone. Ryan just has an unusually direct way in.

CURRENT PROJECTS

Second Chance, feature film in production.

The Simulator, novel, 40,000 words in draft.

New paintings, continuously, in the studio.

MCBSE, an engineering project kept under a separate name (Ryan John Laubscher).

HOW TO ENGAGE

Collect a painting — ryanlouder.com, Artfinder, direct commission, gallery enquiry.

Commission music — composition, songwriting, production, arrangement, mix engineering.

Film and publishing enquiries — for Second Chance and The Simulator.

Press and interviews welcome.

Contact: ryanmusic@mac.com