Richard Scott

Welcome to the music of Richard Scott, Berlin-based creator and performer of forward-leaning electronic and electroacoustic music. Following a background in free jazz and group improvisation, for the past two decades he has been working intensely with a variety of electronic musical technologies, methods and forms. In recent years he has concentrated his energies on creative composition, improvisation and production predominantly using analogue modular synthesisers; including 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 many concerts, several festivals, and has helped found and curate several 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 was amongst the first wave of composer-performers who helped set the scene for the resurgence of interest in analogue modular synthesis. After years dedicated to improvisation on the saxophone, including periods of study with masters such as Elton Dean and Steve Lacy, he finally abandoned it and delved instead into the world of electronics and technology. Following a long period of research with controllers, software and digital tools, such as WiGI/Buchla Lighting instrument, which he developed with the support of STEIM, he befriended the great synthesiser luthier Rob Hordijk and became absorbed in the world of modular synthesis with special focus on Rob's instruments, such as the Blippoo Box. In 2011 he started a concert series Basic Electricity with Navs (and later with Hainbach) in Berlin, which was amongst the first regular modular synthesiser nights dedicated to live performance on the planet. 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 spent years creating his landmark double LP, Several Circles which documented many of the creative possibilities of these instruments, also completing a PhD mapping out his own compositional and improvisational practice, followed by albums including Delirious Cartographies, Tales from the Voodoo Box, Bastard Science, Everything is Always at Once and Eight Studies for Copulating Blippoo Boxes, along with many collaborations, including recordings with Evan Parker, Thomas Lehn, Audrey Chen, Kazuhisa Uchihashi, Axel Dörner and four albums with the group Twinkle3.

He holds a PhDs in Composition, for his portfolio of electroacoustic compositions submitted to the University of Manchester in 2022, and a fuether PhD in Sociology/Musicology, for his dissertation on Free Improvisation, while studying at the London School of Economics in the 80s. Alongside his more creative activities, he works as a Mastering Engineer, mostly for experimental, electroacoustic, contemporary classical and improvised music, and balances these activities with his role as programme leader and supervisor on a Master's degree in Creative Production at the Catalyst Institute for Creative Arts and Technology in Berlin.