“Mesmerising” (London Times) “Transcendent” (BBC)

Philip Clemo is a UK-based artist working across composition, film and sound design. His work explores perception, ambiguity and landscape and has been shown around the world including at the V&A Museum and Eden Project in the UK and at the Cannes film festival. His creative output has been described as “mesmerising” **** (The Times, UK), “startlingly original” **** (The Observer, UK), “intricate, immersive” (Mojo) and “beautiful, transcendent” (BBC). Over 20 years he has worked with a diverse group of musicians including Arve Henriksen, Byron Wallen, B J Cole, Henry Lowther, Pete Lockett, Evi Vine and Cleveland Watkiss.

Clemo’s Breath Project (www.breathproject.net), recently featured in his TEDx and TED talks, is a multi-sensory, highly communicative work exploring humankind’s relationship with life-cycles and the environments we inhabit. Breath, ultimately manifesting as a feature film and art installation, is produced by perfectmotion, in collaboration with Arri, Vision Research and 5 UK universities. Content includes aerial imagery from a gyro-stabilised helicopter rig over Iceland, ground-based material from ultra-high speed camera technology provided by world leaders Vision Research and petri dish filming in collaboration with chemist Dr Jonathan Graham. Breath’s sound-design is drawn from a wide range of Clemo’s and other recordings including Malaysian rainforest insect soundscapes, Icelandic geothermal bubbling & eruptions and human & humpback whale heart rhythms.

Philip Clemo has been a visiting lecturer at University of Brighton, National Film & Television School and Ravensbourne, University of London in the UK.

Philip Clemo’s unique, multi-layered soundscapes balance precariously on a cusp where many different polarities meet: the figurative and the abstract, the acoustic and the electronic, classical, jazz, and rock, the traditional and the avant-garde, the composed and the improvised. His work, both live and over the course of four CDs, has been widely praised in the mainstream and music press, with adjectives like “beautiful,” “transcendent,” “mesmerising,” “indefinable,” “hypnotic,” “addictive,” and so on. Yet, despite all this acclaim, very little is known about Clemo himself, his influences, his way of thinking, and exactly how he creates his music. One simple reason is that interviews with the man have so far been non-existent. Reason for yours truly to meet up with Clemo, via Skype, and ask him some of the questions that his listeners and reviewers must surely have been asking themselves… READ INTERVIEW HERE

Paul Tingen is a music journalist and author. He writes for various publications including Sound on Sound and is best known for his book Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991.

Below are two interviews with Philip Clemo