philip clemo :: biography

"Mesmeric and completely addictive"
The Wire

"Startlingly original"
The Observer

Slowly building murmur

Philip Clemo spent two weeks in the summer of 2008 hanging out of a helicopter filming glaciers, waterfalls, rivers and hot springs in Iceland. Not what you might expect - and not what he might have expected - of a man more at home in a recording studio. But Clemo's artistic practice is characterised as much by restless creativity as by intense ambition, and he knew a film would be required to accompany his new album when it came to staging a live show. Not as a backdrop, but as something more integral. The music may come first, but the film-making is important. The new film project, The Air Holds Still On My Breath, will also be released in its own right.

Clemo's latest album, The Rooms, is a hauntingly beautiful progression through different sound "rooms" or "spaces" featuring artists such as Clive Bell, Theo Travis, Simon Hopkins, and even a Prague string quartet. It recalls numerous musical forebears, from Australian jazz-improv trio The Necks to another threesome, Jansen/Barbieri/Karn, formerly of Japan. There simply isn't a section in the record store where The Rooms would be best shelved; it belongs in them all, perhaps, or most of them.

Philip Clemo was born in 1964 in Insch, Aberdeenshire. He moved to London in 1982, where he has lived ever since apart from a year in Sydney in the mid-1990s. But his musical education began in Scotland where, as a teenager, he took guitar lessons from singer-songwriter Iain MacDonald, who would go on to release two albums in the mid-80s, but in the meantime became an inspiration and mentor to the young Clemo. MacDonald opened Clemo's ears to a new world of music - Nick Drake, Van Morrison, Captain Beefheart, Hendrix - while the teenager had been listening to Television, Talking Heads, Patti Smith and others.

In 1992, Clemo and a friend, who worked for the BBC's World Service, blagged their way into Peter Gabriel's Real World studios on the strength of preparing a package for radio. The piece never aired, but the experience was to prove of crucial importance. "It was late in the evening and we were in the main studio, which is quite something," says Clemo. "Michael Brook was producing and he had a lovely guitar-based loop running on his laptop while he discussed approaches with percussionist Naná Vasconcelos and electric mandolin player U Srinivas. I think Jah Wobble might have been around too. Then Nigel Kennedy walked in and they discussed him doing something Gil Evans-like. That was it - I knew that this was what I wanted to do with my life."

Clemo had started working on his own material in the early 80s, producing demos, songs, instrumentals and short film soundtracks. EMI showed some interest, but it was short-lived. A band was set up, Box in the Sun, later renamed Gallerie, with bassist Julian Lewis, but they didn't perform live.

Around 1995, Clemo started to get serious. He worked on a debut album, Inhale the Colours, while living in Sydney in 1996/97. The album was released under the name Sound, in 1997, featuring contributions from eleven musicians, notably Ysanne Spevack, aka Mee, on metal violin, who shared composition credits with Clemo. "A vision that extends to more advanced jazz textures," said Tony Marcus in Mix Mag. "Lush solo playing with a gradual, meditative ambience." Was it jazz, though? Or ambient electronica? World music, perhaps? Andrew Rawnsley, in US magazine XLR8R, identified influences as various as Philip Glass, Miles Davis and the poet Coleridge, concluding that it was "an incredibly beautiful CD which is well off the beaten track". The title, with its hint at synaesthesia, was perhaps prophetic, as Clemo's work would go on to make even more complex appeals to and demands on the senses.

A second album with Spevack, soundzero, was completed in 1999 and will finally be widely available in early 2009. Phil Slater returned on trumpet, and Tarlochan (Bobby) Singh on tabla. Intriguingly, jazz singer Cleveland Watkiss was brought into the mix, his vocals processed in various ways. Everything, in fact, is processed one way or another. One of the most notable achievements of a Philip Clemo album is how many distinct sounds can be heard, quite clearly. Despite the large number of artists playing a variety of instruments, the sound is never a mess. It sounds as far from a jam session as it's possible to get, despite the fact that improvisation does play a part in the process, but nor does the finished product ever sound overworked or overwrought.

Saxophonist and flautist Theo Travis, who appears on Clemo's latest album, The Rooms, says, "I think Philip is very much a texturalist, constructing his music like a painter with a keen eye on the whole canvas, with the role of the individual musicians being to add a shade of colour or a slight edge to the flavour here and there."

Providing another layer of texture are Clemo's "location sound recordings", field recordings made in Delhi, Malaysia, Sydney, Iceland or the East End of London, and seamlessly woven into the sonic tapestry. Such inclusions are never mere ornamentation. Just as the babel of voices on Paul Schütze and Andrew Hulme's Fell (1996) tend to work very much as an integral part of the overall sound, so too the location sound recordings in Clemo's output are set to work as essential components of the machine. Machine is the wrong word, of course, because the overriding impression is of something organic.

Paul Schütze, a personal acquaintance, has been an important influence on Clemo, who describes him as "my fiercest critic. He doesn't let me get away with anything less than my best. I like his very high standards and uncompromised vision". Clemo's MySpace page lists a variety of influences alongside Schütze, including Brian Eno, Arvo Pärt, David Toop, Gavin Bryars, Holger Czukay, Steve Reich, David Sylvian and many others. Schütze's Phantom City project comes to mind when listening to one or two particular tracks on Clemo's third album, Ambiguous Dialogues (2004), which seem to share with the Phantom City material (Site Anubis, Shiva Recoil) a desire to pose musical problems and a reluctance to solve them, preferring to leave them teetering on the brink of resolution. At the same time, Ambiguous Dialogues marked a big step forward in terms of composition and arrangement. The album is complex, beautiful, mesmerising.

On board for the first time was Far Eastern flute specialist Clive Bell, who had worked with Jah Wobble, Bill Laswell, Paul Schütze and many others as well as dance groups and theatre companies. Bell's name provides prominent continuity between the 2004 release and the new album, The Rooms' cellist Simon Wagland also plays on both. Artists working with Clemo for the first time on The Rooms include trumpeter Henry Lowther, saxophonist and flautist Theo Travis and pedal steel guitar player B J Cole. At the same time as establishing clear links with Clemo's previous output, The Rooms takes bold new strides forward. It's more accomplished, challenging without being spiky; there's something unknowable about it, in a good way, in that you can listen to it over and over and find something new each time: some new thread of sound or melody that snakes out of the undergrowth. Headphones help. Not for nothing is Martin Ditcham credited with providing percussion and "noises". Like all great albums, The Rooms refuses to give up its secrets easily. How quickly do you tire of the album that offers an instant hit? The Rooms is a slow burn and all the more powerful for it. It has legs.

Clemo credits veteran sound engineer Phill Brown, who has worked with Hendrix and Bob Marley among others, for his invaluable contribution to the recording process. "Working with Phill Brown took that studio experience to a new high," he says. But Clemo is no slouch on either side of the mixing desk. "There may be blood on the guitar strings, but Captain Clemo keeps his eye on the weather and his grasp on the tiller is firm," says Clive Bell. "A flash of hail indicates that musical storms are brewing. A sort of passionate restraint seems to characterise the new material on The Rooms; its power is enormous but carefully held in check."

The filming that took place in Iceland in the summer of 2008 was initially inspired by the photography of Klaus D Francke, whose aerial photographs of Iceland are among Clemo's favourite works of art. But there is something inherently cinematic about the textured soundscapes to be heard on The Rooms and earlier albums. Location recordings evoke a sense of place, while movement through landscape is suggested by the surge and advance of the music. Theo Travis speaks of the "slowly building murmur" of the ensemble. "The sometimes almost rollercoaster-like crescendo of the band is very exciting," says Travis, adding that Clemo has "a strong sense of structure and dynamics and is also a pleasure to work with".

As The Rooms wins over more fans, the "slowly building murmur" may also describe a growing chorus of approval. The pleasure is ours.

Nicholas Royle is a novelist, short story writer and critic. He has written for the Guardian, Independent, Time Out and The Wire.