COMPOSER OLIVER COATES JOINED EDITH FOR A SPECIAL 10TH ANNIVERSARY EPISODE OF SOUNDTRACKING

By Madeleine Anderson ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | Press Invite

There is something faintly mythic about Oliver Coates as he arrives on stage – barefoot, quick-moving, with a kind of nervy, elfin intensity, as though he has just slipped in from some parallel sonic dimension.

The occasion is a live recording of Soundtracking Podcast, hosted by the ever-attuned Edith Bowman, marking a decade of her podcast as part of the London Soundtrack Festival. Bowman, gentle  but probing, coaxes Coates into retracing his origin story: the first cello at age nine, still in use, still unnamed, because Coates “won’t go there,” is placed nearby the composer and picked up, plucked and played throughout the evening.

Coates, whose work includes the aching score for Aftersun as well as projects like Pillion and The History of Sound, speaks about composition as though it were a kind of culinary alchemy. Sounds are “lumpy,” textures are kneaded and stretched, time itself is elastic – a great, pliant mass of dough to be pressed and pulled into strange, affecting forms. It’s the sort of language that might sound frivolous in expert hands, but here feels oddly exact, even technical in its tactility.

Projected above him is his laptop mix desk: a range of sliders and waveforms. Coates painstakingly deconstructs his tracks, isolating layers, demonstrating how disparate sonic elements, electronic distortion, cello fragments, environmental noise combine into something emotionally devastating. He describes, almost casually, how he often begins composing without seeing any footage at all, writing blind, guided only by instinct and tone.

There is  a clear and impressive technical fluency on display as Coates outlines his process. He lingers over each stage of sound gathering and mixing, revealing not just inspiration but construction: the digital manipulation, the sculpting of frequencies, the surprising sources of his auditory palette. You sense a voracious listener behind it all, someone absorbing and repurposing sounds from a muddle sources with near-obsessive curiosity.

If the evening occasionally threatens to drift into abstraction, Bowman gently reins it back, grounding Coates’s heavy details in anecdote and context. The result is a conversation (and demonstration) that feels both intimate and rare: a glimpse inside a creative mind that resists neat explanation.

London Soundtrack Festival took place from 9 to 12 April.

WEBSITE

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Photo Credit: