Philip Clemo is a British musician, composer, record producer, sound artist and film-maker.
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Philip James Clemo was born on 3 August 1964 in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. He moved to London in 1982, where he has lived ever since apart from a year in Sydney, Australia in the mid-1990s. His musical education began as a teenager when he took guitar lessons from Scottish singer-songwriter Iain MacDonald, who went on to release two albums in the mid-80s.
Clemo's music crosses genres between jazz, post-rock, contemporary classical and electronica. In the studio he builds complex textures and develops them through a process of composition and improvisation, with contributions from a diverse group of musicians. He also extensively weaves in field recordings made in locations such as Delhi streets, Malaysian rainforests, Sydney building sites, Icelandic mud pools and a glass and metal workshops.
Clemo worked on his 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 violin and vocals, who shared composition credits with Clemo. A second album with Spevack, Soundzero, was completed in 1999 and was released in March 2009. Both albums featured, amongst others, Phil Slater on trumpet, and Tarlochan (Bobby) Singh on tabla with the British rhythm section of Mark Sanders (drums), John Edwards (double bass) and Pete Lockett (percussion) joining on the Soundzero album. Australian vocalist Royce Doherty (Kiva) guested on three tracks on Inhale the Colours (with the track Fade being co-produced by Australian producer Roy Nicholson), while Jazz singer Cleveland Watkiss, often heavily processed, made a guest appearance on Soundzero.
Philip Clemo's third album, Ambiguous Dialogues, was released in 2004 on Metier Jazz. It was the first released under his own name and featured 12 musicians, including Sanders, Edwards and Lockett as rhythm section with Clive Bell (reeds) and Tom Chant (soprano saxophone and bass clarinet).
In October 2008, Clemo released his fourth album, The Rooms, a musical progression through different sound "rooms" or "spaces" featuring 22 musicians such as Clive Bell, Theo Travis (saxophone and flute), Simon Hopkins (electric guitar), B.J Cole (pedal steel), Henry Lowther (trumpet and flugelhorn) and a Prague string quartet. Clemo credits veteran sound engineer Phill Brown, who has worked with Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley among others, for his invaluable contribution to the recording process of The Rooms.
Philip Clemo is currently in the studio working on his 5th album.
Since 1989, Philip Clemo has made several short films shot in locations around the world, including India, Vietnam, Australia and Iceland. He filmed his first major project, 'The Air Holds Still On My Breath - The Iceland Journey', in the Summer of 2008. The film, a series of abstract 'mood paintings' to music from The Rooms was shot using specialist camera technology to capture extreme slow motion details of geothermal activity and waterfalls, and from the air using a gyro-stabilised camera mounted on a helicopter. The Icelandic film project has now grown into a larger feature film project 'Breath: Symphony of the Senses'. Breath, which is in development, presents new perspectives on landscapes from around the world. It maps the human journey from birth to death, and beyond, and explores a parallel journey from sleepwalking to awakening. The dramas of human life are illustrated through the metaphors of landscape and climate, and the human body is explored as a virtual landscape, including in extreme close up and on a specially developed ‘energy field’ camera. The film also explores the terrains of micro ‘landscapes’ through the use of unique high magnification microscopic systems.
Philip Clemo uses video projections of his film work extensively in his live performances.