Paul Schütze

Biography

Schütze was born in Melbourne, Australia. He spent his childhood painting and drawing but left Caulfield Institute after only two months of an Arts Foundation Course to work in a factory. There he earned the money to buy his first electronic musical equipment. In 1979 he spent several months travelling and ended up in London where he immersed himself in concerts, museums and galleries. Returning to Melbourne he formed seminal improvising group Laughing Hands with Gordon Harvey, Ian Russell and Paul Widdicombe. The group existed in several forms until disbanding in 1982.

Schütze spent the next decade writing scores for films. His first feature soundtrack, The Tale of Ruby Rose (1987), won the Australian Film Institute Award for Best original Music Score. During this period Schütze lectured on film sound at both Swinburne Institute and AFTRS and worked as a film critic both in print and on national radio.

In collaboration with Michael Trudgeon, Anthony Kitchener and Dominic Lowe, Schütze curated and featured in Deus Ex Machina, an ambitious exhibition-publication at Monash University in 1989. This was to be his first sound installation and subsequently his first solo album.

In 1992 Schütze re-located to London during a period of particular fertility in the independent music scene and released nearly thirty albums of original works over the next decade. Schütze contributed writings to The Wire, and performed his music in Europe, Scandinavia and Japan often with regular collaborator Simon Hopkins. In 1996 he formed improvising super-group Phantom City with Bill Laswell, Raoul Björkenheim, Dirk Wachtelaer at its core and Alex Buess, Toshinori Kondo, Lol Coxhill and Jah Wobble as guest collaborators.

In 2000 Schütze was invited to exhibit in Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery London by curator David Toop. The same year he received a large commission for a permanent installation work for Cap Gemini and a second for a massive twenty-two screen audio-video work at the Gasometer in Oberhausen, Germany. He also contributed a sound work to James Turrell’s Eclipse event/publication in Cornwall.

In 2002 Schütze began working with Alan Cristea Gallery London. In 2003 his first solo show Vertical Memory opened at ACG. The show included prints, video, sound and a huge wall work in which the whole of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel Topology of A Phantom City was rendered as a continuous plane of silver text. In 2004, Stiftelsen 314 in Bergen, Norway mounted his solo show Garden of Instruments. This was the next stage in a large-scale project that began in 1997 with the release of Schutze’s spoken architectural opera Second Site and continued with a series of lightboxes for ACG also in 2004. This project, which is still ongoing, now has its own site.

In 2006 Schütze began to work with Galleria Estiarte in Madrid showing prints, videos and lightboxes. His work is also shown at the Alan Cristea Gallery in London. Following Schütze's two residencies at Cité des Arts in Paris making photographs, a solo show of photography – Twilight Science – opened in London at Alan Cristea Gallery in May 2008.

An ongoing commission (initiated in 1999) to make a sound work for James Turrell’s Roden Crater has involved several research trips and has now been completed as a five-hour installation piece in Dolby Surround.

In 2011 Schütze launched dressingtheair.com, an open access online platform for multisensory creativity.

Studio albums

Released under a pseudonym

Soundtrack albums

Collaboration albums

Compilation albums

Plus numerous individual tracks released not as part of albums