Peter Chilvers is a Cambridgeshire-based British musician and composer best known as a collaborator with Brian Eno and Tim Bowness.
Chilvers is one of the three co-founders of the Burning Shed online record label, with Tim Bowness and Pete Morgan.
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Chilvers is a multi-instrumentalist favouring acoustic piano, electric piano, laptop computer, assorted keyboards and fretless bass guitar but also playing Chapman Stick, double bass, acoustic guitar and electric guitar. He is also a programmer, extending this skill to electronic percussion parts and extensive electronic orchestrations.
Chilvers has released four albums under his own name – He Wrote This (a selection of mostly instrumental pieces played on basses and Chapman Stick), Stormwatcher (the soundtrack to an "imaginary film version" of Graham Joyce's fantasy novel of the same name), Free (a virally-marketed CD-R release of mostly ambient pieces) and Piano (a collection of solo piano pieces).
In addition to his solo career, Chilvers is also the leader of A Marble Calm – an ambient-inclined music collective centred around himself and reclusive marimba/vibraphone player Jon Hart. Other participants have included Theo Travis, Tim Bowness, Sandra O'Neill, Steve Adey and Cambridge experimental-country guitarist Rob Jackson. This project has released two albums – Surfacing and Blue Turns To Grey.[1]
Chilvers is a collaborator with Brian Eno, and is credited as "Digital Archaeologist" on the 2008 David Byrne and Brian Eno album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. He has also worked with Eno on an iPhone and iPod touch generative music application entitled Bloom (available on the iTunes Store).[2]
Chilvers is a frequent musical partner of Tim Bowness (the singer of No-Man). As Tim Bowness/Peter Chilvers, they released an album of dark reflective ballad songs – California, Norfolk – and an online only remix CDR, Overstrand. The two have also worked together as part of the ambient folk band Samuel Smiles (with Chilvers focussing mostly on piano) and the experimental rock band Henry Fool (with Chilvers concentrating on bass guitar and electric piano).
Chilvers is the instrumental half of the ambient-folk duo Alias Grace, with singer Sandra O'Neill. The duo have released two albums – Embers and Storm Blue Evening – plus the Griosach download EP.
Chilvers has also collaborated with No-Man (playing piano for their brief comeback appearance at the Burning Shed Evening in June 2006, and contributing "space bass" to the album Together We're Stranger) and with songwriter Paul Goodwin.
Chilvers has written a number of generative music soundtracks for the Creatures computer games released by Creature Labs.