With a background in Jazz and Improvised music - performer, composer and creative technologist Craig Scott (b.1987, Aberdeen,Scotland) creates sound works for human and non-human performers. Using handmade analogue hardware, robotics, modified obsolete audio technology and improvising human musicians to explore the disquieting tension that exists between human and machine made music.

This takes form across three streams:

  • Animating instruments and domestic objects in the absence of/in collaboration with improvising human performers;
  • Exploiting malfunction as artistic expression, harnessing the inherent instability of obsolete audio technologies through the precision digital control affords;
  • Acousmatic music in which live instrumental recordings are dissected, transformed and blended with synthetic sources and field recordings, blurring perceptions of the organic/artificial.

As a solo artist he is the recipient of the PRS Composers Fund, Jerwood/PRS Take 5, ACE DYCP ,Francis Chagrin Composer Award, MTF Labs 22 bursary(Edinburgh University), Gain Trust Award, Hope Scott Trust Award, ECF, ACE and PRSF project grants and nominated for the Paul Hamlyn Composer award 2023.

He has been commissioned by BBC Jazz on 3, Late Junction, LumeLab, Nadar Ensemble & Huddersfield Contemp Music Festival. I have been a resident artist at:MTF Labs 22,  NAIRs Contemporary Art Center, University for the Creative Arts, Great Exhibition of the North & Associazione Artemista.

He has performed throughout the UK and Europe at: V&A Museum, Cafe Oto,Gaudiamus, Warsaw Autumn,  WOMAD, The Vortex, HCMF, Manchester Jazz Festival, FOLD, Chalton Gallery, Hundred Years Gallery,  Copenhagen Jazz Festival, Dutch Fretless Guitar Festival, Transform Festival, International Festival for Artistic Innovation,The National Museum of Scotland, MEM festival (Spain) & Trem Azul (Portugal).

Broadcasts of his solo work have been featured on BBC radio, ResonanceFM and NTS. Interviews and features have been published in The Guardian, Wire, Quietus, Jazzwise, Louder than War & Stereogum.

Studio themes