Gareth Davis is an artist, composer, and musician based in Amsterdam. He plays, amongst other things, clarinet(s) — the result of a somewhat impulsive purchase while window shopping in Covent Garden, London, about ten years before the turn of the century. The serendipitous proximity of a rather wonderful (and, crucially, rather cheap) second-hand record shop less than ten metres from the bus stop required for seven years of schooling, combined with the daily ritual of newspaper deliveries, led to an eclectic, dusty, and generally unclassified taste in music.
The result: a career that comfortably disregards genre borders, moving between sonic art, contemporary classical music, rock, improvisation, and noise. Davis has premiered new works by composers such as Bernhard Lang, Peter Ablinger, Toshio Hosokawa, and Jonathan Harvey; appeared as a soloist with orchestras including the SWR Symphonieorchester, Warsaw Philharmonic, and Orquesta de la Comunidad de Madrid; and performed with ensembles ranging from the Neue Vocalsolisten and Arditti Quartet to improvisers Elliott Sharp and Frances-Marie Uitti.
His collaborations extend into the worlds of electronics, working with Robin Rimbaud (Scanner) and Merzbow, and multimedia, with artists such as Christian Marclay and Peter Greenaway. Whatever the context, Davis approaches sound as something physical, flexible, and full of possibility — whether amplified through dense layers of electronics or whispering through the quietest acoustic gesture.
Known for his curiosity and dry humour as much as for his sound, Davis continues to build bridges between contrasting worlds — contemporary and experimental, written and improvised, classical and underground — without ever losing sight of the sheer pleasure of creating.
When the ghost in the machine meets the breath in the reed, expect sparks. Electronic sound artist Robin Rimbaud – Scanner joins forces with acclaimed British bass clarinetist Gareth Davis to create an album where circuitry hums, wood vibrates, and the air between notes crackles with possibility.
This is no polite meeting of minds — it’s an elegant collision. Scanner’s intricate electronic textures weave around Davis’s deep, resonant tones, blurring the boundary between acoustic breath and digital pulse. The result is a sound world that’s at once intimate and expansive, familiar yet thrillingly unpredictable.
Think late-night conversations in abandoned buildings. Think fog rolling over neon. Think sound that slips through your fingers even as it takes hold of you.
The songlines in question , memories and distorted images of travels across various continents, form an imagined biography of places that might or might not have been but somehow seem to exist . Landscapes of blurred statements , lost words and echoes of meandering structures.
“If Miles Davis had been raised on shortwave radio static and midnight phone calls, it might have sounded like this.”
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Releases
