Role Musician | Name Ossian Brown | |
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Albums Angry Eelectric Finger 2, Luminous Darkness, Sulphur ‑ Tarot ‑ Garden, The Visitors, Wounded Galaxies Tap at the Similar People Stephen Thrower, Thighpaulsandra, David Tibet | ||
Cyclobe - Sulphur
Ossian Brown is an English musician and artist. He is notable for being a member of the groups Coil and Cyclobe.
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He joined Coil in 1999 and remained with them until the band’s cessation following the death of singer John Balance in 2004. He worked on several albums and performed live with the group at The Royal Festival Hall, The Barbican in London, and numerous venues throughout Europe.
Brown formed Cyclobe in 1996 with his partner Stephen Thrower (also a one-time member of Coil). They released their first album "Luminous Darkness" in 1999, named after a series of paintings by their friend, the filmmaker Derek Jarman. Cyclobe went on to release a number of albums, most notably "Wounded Galaxies Tap at The Window" (2010). The group seldom perform live: their first and only concert in the United Kingdom was held at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London in 2012, at the invitation of singer and artist Anohni, who performed with them for this occasion. They went on to play the CTM Festival in Berlin, Poland’s Unsound Festival, and the Punkt Festival in Norway, the latter curated by Brian Eno.
Brown's first book Haunted Air was published in 2010 by Jonathan Cape, with an introduction by David Lynch and an afterword by Geoff Cox.
In 2015 Brown contributed to the album Who Is the Sender? by singer songwriter Bill Fay, appearing on the opening track "The Geese Are Flying Westward".
In 2016 he played hurdy-gurdy for the English folk singer Shirley Collins on her album Lodestar, released by Domino Records. The album, Collins’ first since For As Many As Will (1978), was recorded and pre-produced by Brown and Stephen Thrower in the singer’s cottage in Lewes, East Sussex. Among his contributions, Brown composed an original piece for the album, “The Split Ash Tree”. In 2017 he performed a series of UK concerts with Shirley Collins as a member of her group.