Oliver Coates on new album Throb, shiver, arrow of time

When filmmaker Steve McQueen took out his phone to Shazam a track sounding like a cello compressed into millions of disintegrating atoms he heard while shopping, he discovered it was part five of musician, composer, and in-demand film scorer Oliver Coates’ suite Caregiver from his 2020 album skins n slime. Soon after, Coates had the first 15 minutes of McQueen’s ambitious in-the-works documentary Occupied City in his inbox, and a commission to soundtrack the work of one of modern cinema’s great directors.

The story is a modest downplaying of Coates’ achievements – something he does multiple times over the course of our conversation in a cafe in the West End of Glasgow. Coates’ career has taken him from his home in London as something of a cello prodigy to tying a thread from his classical bona fides to the electronic music scene; collaborating with other ardent experimentalists like fellow film alumni Mica Levi, on the road with Thom Yorke, and eventually landing in Glasgow where he's now based, and where he has made a name for himself scoring films and television series; most notably Charlotte Wells’ lauded debut feature Aftersun.

This month Coates will release Throb, shiver, arrow of time, a new album of original work in a similar vein to the aforementioned skins n slime, where he manipulated the bowing of his cello into heaving, metallic drones and surges of shoegazey feedback. Throb, shiver, arrow of time complements those techniques with melancholy and, sometimes, whimsical electronic textures which give it a lighter tone. On Living branches, the echo of Coates’ cello has a vastness, as if it’s funneling up the spiral of a cathedral. On Backprint radiation, its refrain is small but magic – it sounds like something in the midst of creation.

“When you do a film, you’re hoping to map the internal structure of the music onto the dramatic structure of the film, trying to make it bend and flex to whatever is needed,” says Coates. “With this, the time and shape is something I can determine. I could probably make an ambient cello track every day of the week, but it doesn't need to come out unless I really need it to.

“With the last album, I think I felt some pain or suffering, and I really felt like I put that into the work at that time. Not that it's autobiographical, but it's more like you do something with your despair and you turn it into catharsis. I was leaning into distortion, saturation and overdrive, where you're just like lost in it. It's just gorgeous and it does something. This time I didn’t want to just lean into that as a kind of cure-all. I wanted to make the music and the notes speak a bit more and have their own logic.”

Throb, shiver, arrow of time coalesces strands of Coates’ work that have become slowly entangled over recent years. Memory is key – thematically, it links Aftersun (a personal memory of Wells’ father) and Occupied City (our collective memory of the Holocaust), and now this new album.

“Our identities and egos are shored up on these narratives that are probably construed out of conflicting bits of information – there’s no truth,” says Coates of his contemplation of the unreliability and embellishment over time of memory. “There's half-remembered moments mixed with emotions from a different event somehow overlaid to make a coherent sense of self.”

Shopping centre curfew, a short improvisational track, came out of a jumble of thoughts and feelings derived from lockdown, the demolition of an Elephant and Castle mall and a remark in parliament about a curfew for men as an act to reduce violence against women. These all connected for Coates into a dream logic.

Coates opens a hulking coffee table book of the work of artist Sarah Sze. He says her work exploring the fragmentation of our lives through frames and bombardments of images informed the way he approaches the flatness of digital versus the liveness of his playing. It also inspired the concept of the video for Apparition, a kind of “hypervlog” based on thousands of Coates’ personal photos – which somehow succeeds as an act of satire and a radical act of sincerity – directed by Wells. It’s not surprising he should bring a visual eye to his compositions, transmuting the approaches of his collaborators onto his own.

How these abstracts manifest in the music, Coates says, is not dissimilar to how he sees his scoring work: “Music is a very powerful type of glue. It's just sound. And we all assume it's loaded with human meaning. But the music itself is not. We are doing that. We are the ones giving it titles, accusing it of being this and that – too sweet, too sentimental, too dark – because of our own conditioning, our own ears. The music remains a bunch of frequencies floating in time. Those are our own biases.”

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Throb, shiver, arrow of time is released on 18 Oct via RVNG Intl