Will be updating properly over next while - but in the meantime here is my absolute favourite saw piece of the moment! Thank you David Lynch...
March 2007: working as Damon Albarn's Music Supervisor on Monkey: Journey To The West, a new Gorillaz opera scheduled for June 2007 as well as guesting with The Good The Bad and The Queen and various solo performances...
Clip below is me guesting with GBQ at York Hall in London, February 2007
Another clip from a concert in January 2007 with Charlemagne Palestine and The K...
Influences
List of some of the people I have worked with over last two decades:
Damon Albarn, Tom Waits, The Pogues, Jean Jacques Palix, The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, The Handsome Family, Kronos Quartet, 48 Cameras, Talvin Singh, Nitin Sawnhey, Sandy Dillon, Yuka Yamamoto, Ed Harcourt, Test Dept, Peter Hammill, Steve Martland, The Communards, Vivian Stanshall, Joe Strummer, Roger Eno, Steve Nieve, Marc Ribot, Sarah-Jane Morris, Richard Strange, Hal Willner, Marianne Faithfull, Michael Gira, Lydia Lunch, Nick Cave, Jarvis Cocker, Beth Orton, Rufus Wainwright, Martin Carthy, Eliza Carthy, June Tabor, Kathryn Williams, Richard Strange, Beth Orton...
Damon Albarn, Kate St John and myself played a mad version of Syd Barrett's Word Song at The Barbican's recent Syd Barrett Tribute event. I absolutely love this performance (the first time we 3 have performed in public together having just been closed away in 13 for the last 6 months creating the as yet untamed beast that is Monkey: Journey To The West opening in Manchester 28 June 2007 at the Palace Theatre.
There are a bunch of Youtube clips from the Handsome Family UK Tour I played on last Fall, including:
At the moment I am listening to:
Cats, Hats Gowns and Perfume (www.myspace.com/catshatsgowns), The Burning Leaves, Jun Miyake, Yan Jun, Palix, Gorillaz - Monkey: Journey To The West (I hear this about 8 hours a day at the moment!), Harry Partch
At the moment I am watching:
Ryu Murakami, David Lynch early shorts
Sounds Like
5/21/2004 | The Guardian | John L. Walters
The Black Rider (DAVID COULTER - musical director) | Storm in a pawnshop
With its drunken piano, pocket trumpet and musical saw, The Black Rider is obscure-instrument heaven.
The songs of Tom Waits are inherently visual - not just in their words and themes, but in the way they sound. Just as film footage of a lake, or a country house acquires mystery and glamour when underscored by a chugging Nymanesque riff, images of cheap house-fronts and dusty streets take on extra gravitas when accompanied by Waits's ragged tracks. Check out Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law and Night on Earth, or Francis Ford Coppola's fabulous One from the Heart.
The band currently playing in the Barbican Theatre pit have the challenge of re-creating Waits's distinctive instrumental timbres every night. "There are certain things you need to play his music," says associate musical director David Coulter, chatting backstage. "There's upright bass, of course, and pump organ and drunken piano; lots of things that are slightly out of tune with each other, or 'sour', to use Waits's own word."
Coulter, a musical-saw virtuoso who plays another 20 instruments, is the man who put together the band for The Black Rider, the show by Tom Waits, Robert Wilson and William S Burroughs opening at the Barbican tonight after four nights of previews.
Given the palette of sounds needed for Waits's idiosyncrasies, the band has to have a wide range of sounds, styles and skills at their fingertips. Led by musical director Bent Clausen, who plays drums, keyboards and marimba, the eight-piece group has the tough job of capturing the spirit of Waits's messy, freewheeling music while sticking to all the dramatic cues in this demanding, visually rich production. Clausen is a Waits veteran who played on the albums Alice and Blood Money, and worked with Waits and Wilson on Woyzeck.
So the musicians' pit looks like a downtown pawnshop, packed with arcane and/or beautiful instruments: bass clarinet, toy piano, pocket trumpet, accordion, Stroh violin, mandolin, ondes martenot, glass harmonica, cristal Baschet.
The last three are specialities of Thomas Bloch, whose CV includes Messiaen's Turangalila and sessions with Radiohead. Kate St John ( Dream Academy) Caroline Hall, Jack Pinter and Terry Edwards (Scapegoats, Lydia Lunch) play on a huge variety of wind instruments. The ensemble is underpinned by bassist Rory McFarlane, looming out of the pit's seething activity like a mariner clutching the mast of a boat.
If you've heard The Black Rider ( Island, £8.99), you'll have some idea what to expect. Except that Waits's studio recordings are more like miniatures - lovingly made "bigatures" - with Waits taking all the parts himself. The Barbican band has to fill the theatre with a Waits-like sound and accompany a dozen diverse performers, singing, speaking, raging, howling or mute.
This is neither West End musical nor hardcore music theatre. Rather than developing motifs in a compositional way, Waits transforms his material through extremities of sounds. This is hard to notate. In the words of Coulter (who, like Waits himself, doesn't really read music), it's more "organic".
The musical language for the show is established early, with an introductory circus-like theme that jumps in every other bar, as if transcribed from a scratched record. For another scene the ensemble boils menacingly, with little bubbles of free improv escaping from the sonic soup, while a hallucinatory three-note flugel phrase floats overhead. Another potentially static segment derives its richness from the harmonic complexity of Coulter's didgeridoo.
Out in the hall, the mix was superb, its unholy instrumental alliance sounding entirely natural. Many featured instruments - Swanee whistle, musical saw, trombone - can stray far from the diatonic path. The ensemble sections have the requisite sourness. Yet it's a disciplined, professional sound, a swanky showbiz version of the microtonal explorations of Frank Denyer or Harry Partch.
And whether the band is required to rock or swing, play sentimental ballads or demented burlesque, they never step out of character - the huffing, puffing fantasy band created from Waits's rugged templates.
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4/27/2004 | The Guardian | John Fordham
Perfect Partners
...David Coulter made his musical saw tingle the spine on a lyrical treatment of Hurricane (accompanied by Roger Eno on piano)...
Movie scores are usually supposed to complement the action, but the late Nino Rota's could take on the role of an extra character. That was the quality in Rota that producer Hal Willner pursued when he asked a group of American jazz musicians - including then unknowns Bill Frisell and the Marsalis brothers - to reappraise the composer's work for the Amarcord Nino Rota album in 1980. Willner put the show back on the road with an old and new cast for the Barbican's Only Connect series.
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11/1/1999 | The Wire
Review | David Coulter | INterVENTION
...a thrilling acoustic intimacy reminiscent of Japan's Cinorama…
" The highlight of this month's column is the debut solo release from ex-Pogues and Test Dept multi-instrumentalist David Coulter...It has a thrilling acoustic intimacy reminiscent of Japan's Cinorama, and a similar exacting concern with coaxing evocative new textures out of instruments familiar and strange...
Loosely receptive and inventive playing, uncluttered spaciousness, and the lack of rhetorical baggage makes this release a masterpiece of miniaturised beauty."
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7/1/2000 | Mean Magazine | Andy Pierce
Review | David Coulter | INterVENTION
In an astounding range of virtuoso performances, Coulter makes music from a variety of obvious and not so obvious sources.
My editor's plea to limit the word count in this review is only problematic in view of the fact that even an unlimited lexical workout would still not do justice to this fine recording. A multi-instrumentalist in conjunction with Test Dept. and the Pogues, David Coulter has manifest a rather enviable fruition in the marketplace
of multiethnic, pan-experimental music making. INterVENTION achieves the very reality of its titular double/revealed meaning because Coulter (and a revolving collection of players) is ever respectful of the context and function of his instrumental color combinations and the discoveries inherent in his compositional objectives.
In an astounding range of virtuoso performances, Coulter makes music from a variety of obvious and not so obvious sources. Terracotta pots and paper, one; string fiddle, didgeridoo, and a host of more "conventional" pop instrumentation make music that simmers minimalist soul wails, resounds with echoes from an alien topography, and undulates to a rhythm of universal knowing. The short-duration epic of "Polaroids" is indication that Coulter is not out for mere wank and flex. In a series of short interlocking compositions featuring the likes of Marc Ribot, Steve Nieve and Phil Minion, Coulter expertly weaves a sweeping musical mise-en-scene that in the service of lesser composers might only achieve density without attention to the more exacting skills of restraint.
About as flawless a recording as has been released this year, INterVENTION never fails to achieve what mere words can hardly convey.
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6/20/2001 | allmusic.com | Thom Jurek
David Coulter | INterVENTION | Review
AMG Expert Review
David Coulter is well known among musicians as a sideman
of enormous talent on virtually any instrument he chooses to play and can
perform in almost any musical setting. (Hint: he was in the Pogues and the
industrial power unit Test Dept. at the same time.) His debut solo album on
Young God (label boss Michael Gira has a knack for discovering new talent
and recording them before anyone else does) is a compendium of Coulter's
amassed musical and sonic knowledge. The disc opens with "Kinsnow
Orchestra," on which Coulter plays jew's harp, krar, and one-string fiddle,
while being accompanied by a sheet-like soundscape by Palix, a double bass,
and guitar. There is an Indian raga feel to the piece, but it has no time
signature, it's all microtones strung together in rows. On "How Can I Love
Thee?" Coulter's soprano saxophone accompanies an over-the-phone reading by
Iain Morris of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem of the same name. Its
darker-than-night feel gives the impression of a suicide note being left on
an answering machine. When Coulter writes his short "Broken Mass," one can
hear the Kyrie Section of the orthodox liturgy cut short all but one tone
and three notes. Coulter does a vocal in the tradition of the Tuvans and
Tibetans meeting in the Himalayas while using a plectra violin and a piano
for sonic architecture; it doesn't tower above you, it floats through your
body, leaving a longing for the sacred with the taste of the profane on your
skin. On "Harmonik," where the entire piece is a dance tune created and
executed in just intonation with Ghedalia Tazartes on vocal and accordion,
the overtones come from the sawing of the violin in its high register, just
behind its own drone and the accordion pulsing with the organic percussion
the same series of chords over and over again. The effect is not just
hypnotic, it's entrancing. Coulter's record is virtually unidentifiable as
genre music—it doesn't even fit in the world music category because more
often than not, whether he's playing violins, saxophones, the didgeridoo,
ukulele, or singing, his music sounds as if it were from another world,
where musical languages are interchangeable and complimentary rather than
codified and restrictive. His mates on this date are as varied as the music—from avant jazz/improvisational vocalist Phil Minton, guitarist Marc Ribot,
and pianist Steve Naïve, all of whom appear on the album's astonishing
closer, "Polaroids," a composition of such dynamic and textural wealth and
modal invention it appears to defy musical logic while sounding so far
inside Western musical systems as to be inherent in their origins.
Intervention is a confoundingly beautiful work from an artist whose name
should be synonymous with the term "original."
David Coulter has worked internationally as an artist, teacher, lecturer, workshop leader and deviser/director of over 30 large scale music/performance/theatre events for young people. David has created and composed soundtracks for numerous dance, theatre, film, tv and radio projects including Yolande Snaith, Protein Dance, Candoco and Le Ballet du Fargistan. In April 2004 he played musical saw in Hal Wilner’s Nino Rota/Fellini tribute concert at the Barbican. He is currently guesting with the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain and spent most of last year and January 2005 as Associate Music Director and multi-instrumentalist with Tom Waits and Robert Wilson on the opera The Black Rider, produced by BITE. In September and October 2004 David performed on stage at the Geary Theatre in San Francisco in more than 50 sold out performances of The Black Rider. He was also didjeridu player to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth ll on several State occasions including recitals at Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey. In December 2004 he toured Japan. Coulter saw in 2005 playing 3 sold-out nights at Sydney Opera House as guest soloist for Came So Far For Beauty - a celebration of the music of Leonard Cohen - where he played music saw and jews harp with Nick Cave, Jarvis Cocker, Antony, Rufus + Martha Wainwright and The Handsome Family. In February 2005 David was in San Francisco where he and friend Ralph Carney contributed their eclectic soundscapes to Hal Willner's score for Robert Wilson’s KOI POND, which was shown at Expo 2005 in Tokyo.
His numerous live and studio collaborations as a multi-instrumentalist include work with The Pogues , Kronos Quartet, Charlemagne Palestine, Talvin Singh, Nitin Sawnhey, Sandy Dillon, Ed Harcourt, Thea Gilmore, Test Dept, Peter Hammill, Steve Martland, The Communards, Vivian Stanshall, Joe Strummer, Roger Eno, Steve Nieve, Marc Ribot, Sarah-Jane Morris, Richard Strange, John Harle, Hector Zazou, 48 Cameras, Michael Gira, Lydia Lunch, Marianne Faithfull and Mary Margaret O’Hara.
Early 2006 sees another Daughters of Albion concert this time at The Barbican in London, a residency at Dartington College of Arts and Coulter's reprising his role as Associate Music Director for The Black Rider which will be running at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles until mid-June.
Please keep eyes open for the Spring release of One Little Indian artiste Sandy Dillon's new album - Pull The Strings - produced by and featuring DC!
sorry i haven't got back to you very quickly about coming up to see you, i'll try and get the dates off dad but he's in hong kong at the mo so i dunno! xx
Thank you for the good wishes for the Musical Saw Festival! It was fantastic - 30 saw players showed up! Now I am recouperating from organizing the ordeal, but the effort was totally worth it.
Thought you might enjoy this video from the 1978 Saw Festival - Gordon Mumma, electronic music composer who worked with effects way before they became in vogue: http://www. youtube. com/watch?v=qaN3-luGBiU
Miss the Saw Man here in SF! Congrats on all the great gigs and projects! Hugs to you & Willner. Can't wait to collab again soon. InterDependence Day Love on the Conspire, Mads
Funny you should talk about transport. We weren't transported anywhere because I coach didn't pick us up. Now then, learning curve or need for extreme violence? You decide x x
Hi David, so nice to hear from you again! I hope you are enjoying that hot studio! I'm happy to have you on my friends list. It sure was a great experience to work with you. I think it will be great if we could work together again sometime. Be well and feel free to mail me here anytime you want. I'd love to hear from you. -ZY
