Chris Cutler
Chris Cutler (born January 4, 1947) is an English percussionist, composer, lyricist and music theorist. Best known for his work with English avant-garde rock group Henry Cow, Cutler was also a member and drummer of a number of other bands, including Art Bears, News from Babel, Pere Ubu and (briefly) Gong/Mothergong. He has collaborated with many musicians and groups, including Fred Frith, Lindsay Cooper, Zeena Parkins, Peter Blegvad and The Residents, and has appeared on over 100 recordings. Cutler's career spans over three decades and he still performs actively throughout the world. Cutler created and runs the British independent record label Recommended Records and is the editor of its sound-magazine, RēR Quarterly. He has also given a number of public lectures on music, published numerous articles and papers, and written a book on the political theory of contemporary music, File Under Popular (1984).
Chris Cutler (born January 4, 1947) is an English percussionist, composer, lyricist and music theorist. Best known for his work with English avant-garde rock group Henry Cow, Cutler was also a member and drummer of a number of other bands, including Art Bears, News from Babel, Pere Ubu and (briefly) Gong/Mothergong. He has collaborated with many musicians and groups, including Fred Frith, Lindsay Cooper, Zeena Parkins, Peter Blegvad and The Residents, and has appeared on over 100 recordings. Cutler's career spans over three decades and he still performs actively throughout the world. Cutler created and runs the British independent record label Recommended Records and is the editor of its sound-magazine, RēR Quarterly. He has also given a number of public lectures on music, published numerous articles and papers, and written a book on the political theory of contemporary music, File Under Popular (1984).
Vampyr And Other Stories
In the late 1980s two globetrotting Milanese composers joined forces to produce an acclaimed and prescient record made in equal parts from their own performances and ethnic field recordings, a little in the manner of Eno/Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts - but rather more evolved. This 30th anniversary release includes some early pieces, not already available on CD made this way but, mainly, features the entirety of their score for Theodore Carl Dreyer's legendary silent film, Vampyr - perfo…
File Under Popular: Theoretical and Critical Writings on Music (Book)
This substantial book was written in 1984/85, soon after the band broke up and while memories were still fresh. It was written very much from the perspective of the time – that’s more important than it may sound in such a project: hindsight has its own value, but it loses the essence of the moment, the context, the freshness; the feel of unfamiliarity. Originally written as a master’s degree thesis, it was updated and published in book form in 2000 by the Norwegian University of Science and Tech…
Chris Cutler in a Box
These 10 CDs (and DVD) collect together solo work, compositions and collaborations made between 1972 and 2022 by percussionist and lyricist Chris Cutler and include as well as three previously released solo CDs ('solo', 'twice around the earth' and 'there and back again'), more than five hours of unreleased materials, as well as a double CD collection of tracks culled from official recordings featuring Henry Cow, Art Bears, Cassiber, News From Babel, Aqsak Mabou, Duck and Cover, Peter Blegvad, R…
Intonarumori: Ieri ed Oggi
New and old compositions for Luigi Russolo’s legendary Intonarumori. After publishing his visionary manifesto, the Art of Noises, in 1913, the futurist painter Luigi Russolo designed and built a revolutionary family of new instruments with which to compose with noise: black, wooden boxes, fitted with huge acoustic horns, crank-handles (to drive them) and levers (to vary the pitch). They came in different varieties – designed to give composers access to five of what Russolo had identified as ‘the…
Year of The Dragon
A collection of 5 songs and 4 instrumental pieces that explore equally - and simultaneously - spontaneous performance values, close compositional detail and extensive processing. Made out on the rocky coast of Maine with just a TV eye keeping tabs on a world skidding to hell in a handcart, all the basic work was done by MacLean and Cutler with Julie Thompson (voice) added later – alongside additional parts played by Frank Gross (bassoon), Michael Bierylo (laptop, samples, circuits) and Ti…
Three Pieces Suite
Studio recordings seven years in the honing. Plus music for a film by Jacques Leduc, with guest Tom Cora.Plus part of a live performance at Sound Symposium, Newfoundland.
Shark!
From the much lauded Queen Elizabeth Hall concert and club Link in Bologna, two very different knife-edge tours through sound and structure landscapes; from rollercoaster to glider. 'Indescribeable but wonderful. Quite superb. I would have been happy listening for ten times as long' Gibralter.
There and Back Again
A companion to 'Twice around the Earth, 'There and Back Again' uses 44 environmental recordings to explore - amongst other things - the way memory works, and how the experience of passing time is constructed. Mainly it's just meant to be good to listen to: surprising, serendipitous, mundane - but alien, the commonplace transfigured - an agglomeration of inadvertent sounds made haphazardly by the world and some of its inhabitants that were never meant to survive, and certainly not to be l…
Live in Moscow, Prague & Washington
72 minutes consisting of the whole of a 1978 Prague concert, a cause celebre at the time, (audibly) dividing the 3500 public and provoking controversy for some years after; a snippet from Washington, and the whole of a Moscow concert 10 years later (May '89).This is improvised music that refuses to fit into the usual categories of improvisation, as well as being technically and formally provocative.
Live in Trondheim, Berlin & Limoges
Digital recordings from the Nordlydd Contemporary Music Festival and Berlin's Tacheles from 1991. Plus the historic prescient noise-music 1978 analogue recording from Limoges as a bonus. All singing, all dancing, all hell let loose. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee...
Two Gentlemen in Verona
An almost complete concert from Verona, 1999, slightly edited for listening logic with an impeccably clear and transparent sound. Very different from CCFFs 1 and 2, this documents a more upfront, intense performance, full of history, rock, post rock, tunes, rhythms, even melodies - all transformed into a contemporary and compressed musical language. With a surprising encore!
Hangman's Hill
13 New songs from the master of witty, cynical but wistful songs, Peter Blegvad. With John Greaves and Chris Cutler.Follow up to the masterly Just Woke Up, sporting great new songs and guests including B.J.Cole, Geraint Watkins, Adam X, Chris Stamey, Bob Drake, Stoffer Blegvad.
p53
Commissioned project from Chris Cutler for the 25th Frankfurt Jazz Festival 1994, featuring Marie Goyette, Zygmunt Krauze, Otomo Yoshihide, Lutz Glandien and Chris Cutler (score contemporary composers: 2, Sound debris organisers: 2, virtuoso pianists: 2, Virtual instruments: 2, Rythmn, Melody, Chaos: 2,2,2, more of the same: nil). His first without sung text. Instruments: Two Grand Pianos, Turntables, Random-tuned Guitar, Drums/Electronics, Computer and real-time processing. A single, com…
Twice Around The Earth
An experiment in listening. These compositions are an offshoot of the daily soundscape programme I ran for Resonance FM radio between July 2001-2002, which consisted of commissioned real-time recordings made all around the world between 23.30 and midnight GMT (the time of the broadcast). This CD begins with material from these broadcasts confecting, as it were, two composites of the Earth and a few of its inhabitants, somewhat analogous to what an impossible satellite ear with pinpoint ac…
Solo
It took long enough. The electric kit finally gets a chance to speak for itself. I won't try to describe it, but it's been pretty much my main work of the last three years. I can't say it reminds me of anything else but, naturally, I suggest you buy it.