Ever since rocking up to 4MBS Classic FM as a shy 21-year-old, Julian Day's career in arts journalism and presentation has sky-rocketed. Julian has appeared on Triple-J, ABC Local Radio and Triple Zed, and written articles for 24 Hours magazine and The Courier Mail newspaper. He was the voice behind the award-winning program New Music Australia until early 2004. His growing list of interviewees includes composers and performers Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Michael Berkeley, Andreas Scholl, The Eroica Trio, Peter Sculthorpe and Tim Freedman of The Whitlams.

At heart, however, Julian is an impassioned composer and visual artist. The son of a rock guitarist and singer, he began writing pop songs as soon as Tears for Fears hit the English charts. On the 'classical' front, his composition studies with Gerard Brophy and Stephen Leek at the Queensland Conservatorium were followed by studies with Louis Andriessen, David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe at the 2003 Bang On A Can Summer Institute of Music in North Adams, Massachusetts, USA. He also attended the 1998 Young Composers' Forum at the Australian National Academy of Music in Melbourne, and in 1999 won The Australian Voices Young Composer of the Year Award for his choral work O Rose.

An advocate of "getting out there and doing it", Julian in 1997 co-founded COMPOST, the group of emerging composers behind such projects as BIG (ABC Ferry Rd, 1999), AMPidextrous Hearing (2002 Brisbane Festival, Brisbane Powerhouse) and theBRAINgame (2003 Science Week, ABC Ultimo, Sydney). Julian recently directed and co-composed HEAVY METAL, an evening long concert of 'extreme pipe organ music' in this year's Melbourne Fringe Festival.

Not content with just making music, Julian also delves into performance art, photography and film work. His performance/installation art duo 'juaanellii' has presented work at the Queensland Art Gallery, Metro Arts and at the Minimax Festival of Post-minimalism at the Brisbane Powerhouse. In 2000 Julian directed his first short film Private Parts in collaboration with Square Eye Productions, the company behind film clips for Silverchair, Alex Lloyd and george.

Julian likes music to be "deep, strange, original and extreme", to quote Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Nicolas Godin. His favourite artists include Oval, Björk, Michael Gordon and György Ligeti. His favourite colours are red and black.

Julian explores the best contemporary music from Australia and abroad in 'New Music Up Late', Saturday nights from 10.30pm. He also presents 'At Home', the new program that's made to help you sit back and relax on a Saturday evening.