Introducing: Richard Scott, musician – Distant Sounds

Richard Scott is a prolific free improvising musician and electroacoustic composer and living in Berlin working with electronics including modular synthesizers and controllers such as the Buchla Thunder and Lightning and his own self-designed WiGi infra red controller developed at STEIM. He studied free improvisation in the 80s with John Stevens, saxophone with Elton Dean and Steve Lacy, Action Theatre improvisation with Sten Rudstrom and electroacoustic composition with David Berezan and Ricardo Climent. Richard holds an MMus in Electroacoustic Music from Manchester University and a PhD from London University for his thesis on Free Improvisation. He is currently engaged in composing a second PhDportfolio in Composition at Manchester University.

What initially interests you in theatre being inspired by your music?

I am interested in rhythm, space and articulation and how different kinds of narrative can emerge from these. So the opportunity to collaborate with dance, painting, text etc is always an interesting challenge.

How did you decide on a piece of music that would be used to inspire a piece of theatre?

I wanted to the music to suggest a sense of distance, mystery and “otherness” amounting to a kind of dislocated sense of place. It was important that it could stand both as a finished and clear piece of music with its own life but also that it had an unfinished quality, to leave space for interpretation and other layers of narrative.

How do you feel about the concept of the play inspired by your music?

I find it quite brilliant. It is fascinating to me that without me giving any comment of the motivation behind the composition the writer also chose the idea of the alien, the other and of a “threatened” social and physical as major themes

Have you ever been to Australia- if so, what did you think?

I haven’t. But it might be worth my mentioning that reading the book seeing the film Walkabout by Roger Ebert at an early age left an indelible impression. I think the remarkable atmosphere of this story informed my composition in some ways, especially this idea of a dislocated space.