37 Facts About Chris Cutler

Chris Cutler was born on 4 January 1947 and is an English percussionist, composer, lyricist and music theorist.

Chris Cutler has collaborated with many musicians and groups, including Fred Frith, Lindsay Cooper, Zeena Parkins, Peter Blegvad, Telectu and The Residents, and has appeared on over 100 recordings.

Chris Cutler created and runs the British independent record label Recommended Records and is the editor of its sound-magazine, ReR Quarterly.

Chris Cutler has given a number of public lectures on music, published numerous articles and papers, and written a book on the political theory of contemporary music, File Under Popular.

Chris Cutler assembled and released The 40th Anniversary Henry Cow Box Set, a collection of over 10 hours of previously unreleased recordings by the band.

Chris Cutler was born in January 1947 in Washington, DC to a British intelligence officer and his Austrian wife.

In 1948 the family moved to England, where Chris Cutler was brought up.

Chris Cutler never studied music but tried his hand at banjo, guitar, trumpet and flute while at school.

Frith, Hodgkinson and Chris Cutler became Henry Cow's permanent core until the band split up in 1978.

Chris Cutler founded November Books in 1982, the publishing wing of Recommended Records.

In 1982, Cutler co-founded the Anglo-German group Cassiber with German musicians Heiner Goebbels, Alfred Harth and Christoph Anders.

In 1983, Chris Cutler formed News from Babel, another song-orientated group with core members Chris Cutler, Lindsay Cooper, Zeena Parkins and Dagmar Krause.

Chris Cutler was a member of the United States experimental rock band Pere Ubu between 1987 and 1989.

Chris Cutler had first encountered them in Washington DC in 1978 while exploring the possibility of Henry Cow touring America.

Chris Cutler kept in touch with Pere Ubu until they split in the early 1980s and their singer, David Thomas began a solo career.

Chris Cutler left in 1989, but was credited as a co-writer on the band's 1991 album World in Collision for several songs written during his tenure.

Chris Cutler wrote the song texts and played drums, while Glandien composed and performed the music with samplers and computers.

Chris Cutler collaborated with Glandien again in 1994 to record Scenes from no Marriage and to participate in p53, a commission for the 25th Frankfurt Jazz Festival with Zygmunt Krauze, Marie Goyette, Otomo Yoshihide.

Chris Cutler and Fred Frith have been touring Europe, Asia and the Americas since 1978 and have given over 100 duo performances.

On 4 November 2006 Chris Cutler, Jon Rose and Zeena Parkins performed with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ilan Volkov, at the Glasgow City Halls in Glasgow, Scotland.

In 2009, Chris Cutler toured North America with avant-garde Czech violinist Iva Bittova.

Since the late 1990s, Chris Cutler began giving solo electrified percussion performances to audiences across the world.

Chris Cutler's first was in Tokyo in June 1998, which was recorded in a documentary film, At the Edge of Chaos, by award-winning film director Shinji Aoyama.

In 2001 Chris Cutler released Solo: A Descent Into the Maelstrom, an album of solos on his electrified drum kit taken from live performances in Europe and the United States between August 2000 and May 2001.

The material was taken from a daily half-hour radio programme Chris Cutler ran for Resonance FM: Out of the Blue Radio between July 2001 and July 2002.

Chris Cutler never studied music and taught himself drumming on makeshift drum kits assembled with whatever was on hand.

Chris Cutler slowly developed a technique using a "top-down" approach as opposed to the traditional "bottom-up" approach used by schooled drummers.

Chris Cutler learned the opposite way, hearing or imagining a sound and then disciplining his hands and feet to reproduce it.

The nature of Henry Cow was to experiment and explore and it was here that Chris Cutler developed and refined his drumming techniques.

Chris Cutler began by attaching old telephone mouthpieces to drums and cymbals, and connecting them to an amplifier and a reverb unit.

Chris Cutler later added a small mixer for four independent inputs.

Chris Cutler had begun using cheap guitar transducers and a table full of additional wired objects.

Chris Cutler experimented briefly with drum pads triggered to play sampled or synthesized sounds, but quickly dismissed this option because he found them unresponsive and inflexible.

Chris Cutler preferred real-time processing: amplifying and modifying actual sounds produced by the drum, making it a kind of an electroacoustic instrument, immediate and responsive, and retaining all the qualities of an acoustic drum kit.

Chris Cutler introduced feedback into the mix by placing a monitor speaker near the kit.

The electrified drum kit continues to evolve and to Chris Cutler it is "satisfyingly unpredictable", responsive to all his old techniques while continuing to generate new ones.

Chris Cutler has written and published a number of essays on music, including:.