Richard Scott

Welcome to the sounds of Richard Scott, Berlin-based creator and performer of forward-leaning electronic and electroacoustic music. Once a saxophonist focused on free jazz and group improvisation, for the past two decades he has been working intensely with a variety of technologies, methods and musical forms. In recent years he has concentrated his energies on creative composition, improvisation and production, with a particular emphasis on analogue modular synthesisers; including those remarkable instruments created by Don Buchla, EMS, Serge Tcherepnin, Émilie Gillet and Rob Hordijk.

Richard has performed widely with many groups, as a soloist, and recently with visual artists and with a 23-piece choir and a symphony orchestra. He has curated concerts, several festivals, and helped found and curate multiple concert series in Berlin. He has released a handful of out-of-the-ordinary albums as a solo composer and performer, and many more recordings and performances with a slew of remarkable collaborators, including; Axel Doerner, Ute Wasserman, Richard Barrett, Audrey Chen, Nicolas Collins, Phil Minton, Shelley Hirsch, Kazuhisa Uchihashi, Evan Parker, Sidsel Endresen, David Sylvian, Clive Bell, David Ross and Thomas Lehn. 

Richard is recognised as one of the first wave of composer-performers who helped set the scene for the recent resurgence of interest in analogue modular synthesis.  After 15 dedicated years with the saxophone, including periods of study with masters such as Elton Dean and Steve Lacy, he abandoned his instrument and delved instead into the world of electronics and digital technology. After six years research with controllers, software and digital tools, such as WiGI/Buchla Lighting instrument he developed with the support of STEIM, he met Rob Hordijk and eventually became fully absorbed in the world of modular synthesis. He spent some years creating his landmark double LP, Several Circles on Cusp Records which records some of the compositional possibilities of the instruments, and he completed a PhD mapping out some consequences of these tools for his own compositional practice. In 2011 he started a concert series Basic Electricity with Navs (and later with Hainbach) in Berlin, one of the first regular modular synthesiser nights dedicated to international live performers. He instigated two editions of the Sines and Square festival in Manchester, dedicated to analogue and modular synthesis, and edited a related edition of the online journal eContact!. Since then, he has been performing regularly with his suitcase modular and Hordijk instruments, both solo and with many great musicians on Berlin's fertile improvised, electroacoustic and experimental music scenes. 

He holds two PhDs; in Composition, for his recent portfolio of electroacoustic compositions submitted to the University of Manchester, and in Sociology/Musicology, for his dissertation on Free Improvisation, written as a youthful Spontaneous Music Ensemble fan studying at the London School of Economics in the 80s. Alongside his more creative activities, he works as a Mastering Engineer, mostly for experimental music that nobody else knows what to do with, and balances these activities with his role as leader of the Master's degree in Creative Production at the Catalyst Institute for Creative Arts and Technology in Berlin.