Simon Fisher Turner is renowned for his film soundtrack work which started in collaboration with Derek Jarman, for whom he scored many feature films – from Caravaggio (1986), through to Jarman’s final work Blue (1993). Caravaggio (1986) began a long relationship with the BFI, and more recently Fisher Turner composed the score for restorations of three silent films, Un Chant D’Amour dir Jean Genet (1950), The Great White Silence dir Herbert Ponting (1924) and The Epic of Everest dir. Captain John Noel (1924), winning a prestigious Ivor Novello Award for the soundtrack to The Epic of Everest.

With a career as varied and diverse as his current projects, Simon Fisher Turner began as a young actor in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and in between then and now has released records under his own name and as The King Of Luxembourg and Deux Filles.

 

Simon Fisher Turner’s collaborations have seen him performing live at the ICA with Factory Floor as part of their Artists In Residency and at the Roundhouse with the artists Ashley Paul and Nik Colk Void (Factory Floor / Carter Tutti Void) as part of The Pace Of Time festival. He has participated in Ryuichi Sakamoto and Tomoyasu Hirano’s Kizuna project, a collection of artists’ works raising funds for the organisations dealing with the recent natural and manmade disasters in Japan (http://kizunaworld.org and his collaboration with Shiro Takatani, Chroma, premiered at the Festival de Marseille and continues to this day.

In 2016, The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger was released, a five year long project by Tilda Swinton, Colin MacCabe and Christopher Roth, produced by the Derek Jarman Lab in Birbeck University of London, in collaboration with Simon Fisher Turner who scored the piece.

Simon Fisher Turner and Klara Lewis released their collaboration, Care, in late 2018 via Editions Mego, this followed a previous collaboration with Lewis and Rainier Lericolais on a live soundtrack to Berlin, Symphony of a Metropolis dir. Walter Ruttman (1927), the soundtrack itself based on recordings he has made in the city over twenty years.

In 2020 Simon Fisher Turner released A Quiet Corner in Time (Mute), his collaboration with the artist and author Edmund de Waal, an extension of a piece created for de Waal’s –one way or other– installation at the Schindler House in Los Angeles. This was followed in 2022 by A Quiet Corner in Time (Exquisite Corpse) remix project which saw Alessandro Cortini, Yann Tiersen, Nik Colk Void and many more create a musical exquisite corpse, with each artist remixing the previous remix, with no knowledge of what went before that.

Simon Fisher Turner recently returned to acting again, will release a new album later this year, and his ongoing sonicblog Guerilla Audio releases regular missives through Touch Music.

Related exhibitions & events

• WeTransfer presents: BLUE NOW