Born in 1956, Mark learned the piano, cello and 'musicianship' at Ormskirk Junior Music School, near Liverpool, from the age of 8. Musicianship classes consisted of presenting the music that had been composed each week. As a teenager he studied a lot of 20th century music and also played in bands. For a time he went to London for piano lessons with Paul Crossley, a specialist in Messiaen and Tippett. Later as a student at York University he developed a passion for contemporary music of all types, improvisation and world music. He went on to do an M.A. at the University of California San Diego, funded by a Fulbright Scholarship (1977-79). His supervisor and mentor there was Pauline Oliveros. It was new music total immersion: student and staff compositions, home-made gamelans, jazz, punk rock, Californian ritual/trance music. He also studied piano with Tamás Ungár, a noted interpreter of Bartok. He returned to London to do a PhD at City University on gesture and repetitive behaviour in free jazz piano, returning to the U.S.A. in the early 80s to do research in New York City. He spent a semester at the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, up-state New York, with Karl Berger, Don Cherry, Borah Bergman, Ed Blackwell, Steve Lacy, Marion Brown, and other pioneers of jazz and improvised music.
Living in London he was involved with the experimental/minimalist scene and he organised performances at the Air Gallery on Roseberry Avenue. Mark had a piano duo with Schaun Tozer, Jim and Tonic playing their own minimalist-type compositions which frequently wandered off into free improvisation. The duo spent a period as artists-in-residence at Dartington College in 1982. For a while Mark was musical director for the Extemporary Dance Company arranging music and playing on tours. He was a founder member of the English Gamelan Orchestra, a group of London based musicians directed by Neil Sorrell and Sri Hastanto (from STSI Surakarta) which played all over the UK, often with Javanese guest musicians. This was really, for most of the British public, the first contact with gamelan music, in concerts and workshops. The orchestra disbanded after a month-long tour on the Arts Council Contemporary Music Network in 1983.
Moving to Birmingham he played drums with a pop group The Copy for a few years and at the same time had a more 'classical' duo with the band's pianist and singer Janet Sherbourne. The duo toured extensively in the UK, USA, Canada, and Italy performing 20th century repertoire, their own music, and pieces written for them by Howard Skempton, Michael Parsons, Jamie Crofts, Jan Steele and others. They recorded 3 albums together. He was also keyboard player for the Harmonie Band which played new film scores, mostly composed by the group's leader Paul Robinson, for old silent classics at venues such as the National Film Theatre in London. In 1986 he rebuilt and retuned a broken vibraphone found in a store cupboard at the Triangle Arts Centre in Birmingham. From this developed a 3-year gamelan-making project, funded by West Midlands Arts. Using sheet metal for gongs, frames and resonators made from plywood, timber and plastic pipe, and a restored/adapted Dulcetone (a 1930s chime-bar keyboard instrument) it was designed as a mobile ensemble for workshops and concerts. It was housed at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and then later at Oxford Brookes University. In 1993 he started learning a type of Balinese gamelan music gendèr wayang for shadow puppet theatre with Nick Gray. The quartet Segara Madu gave concerts and performances with puppeteers and storytellers, and then studied together in Bali, supported by a Leverhulme grant, with the master musician, I Wayan Loceng. He returned to Bali in following years for further study with Pak Loceng and I Nyoman Gunawan, an expert in the archaic iron gamelan salunding. Having lectured at Birmingham Conservatoire in world music for several years, in 1994 he joined the permanent staff as Head of World Music, and assistant head of composition working alongside the English composer Andrew Downes, the then professor. He was course director of a new degree in Indian classical music, offered by the conservatoire at that time. This was the first of its kind in the UK, with an exchange programme with the University of Bombay. Among other duties he directed the gamelan ensemble and he organised the annual Music Xtra festival showcasing the jazz, rock, folk, gospel, composition and world music activities of the conservatoire. He was a delegate of the working party for Connect, an EU funded project in 2001/2002 set up to look at traditional conservatory music education and how to implement changes to make it more relevant to a multicultural Europe.
As well as teaching he carried on with composing projects, such as the organ/bass/drums trio Las Vegas Powercut. In 2000 his 8-hour performance/installation The Loop Orchestra using Balinese iron gamelan instruments and live electronics took place at the IKON gallery, Birmingham. This was followed by "Recompositions", a collaboration with British artist Graham Gussin commissioned by the IKON. He then created the soundtrack for another work by Graham Gussin for the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. Mark has worked for a number of years with Sarvar and Sonia Sabri on fusion music and dance projects. In 2006 he met Praveen D Rao, a film composer and percussionist from Bangalore, and subsequently played with him on tour with the Chitraleka dance company, and in the group Earth n Beat. He has collaborated in various projects with classical vocalists Faheem Mazhar and Sanchita Pal. He has worked as an assistant to Dr L Subramaniam and conducted the LSO in a concert of his works for orchestra at the Barbican in London in April 2006. Mark moved to France in 2002 to concentrate on composing and independent music projects. His recent pieces tend to be site-specific, somewhere in between static installation and live performance. He presented a programme of Balinese music in the Semaine Steve Reich, attended by the composer, at the Auditorium Maurice Ravel, Lyon. He has participated in contemporary music festivals in the Aude such as ZieuMZic and Le Son MiRé. Locally he teaches piano and composition, runs world music projects in schools, and is a music animateur at Ribambelle children's village. He has given lectures on world music cultures and practical workshops on rhythm skills and gamelan music. Being involved with the Aude's artistic community he has been working recently with artists from different disciplines: with poet Valérie Schlée, painter Christian Hadengue, film maker/photographer Alvin Booth, the improvisation collective Symphony of Wrong and the street theatre group Show Devant.