Peter Gregson has collaborated with many of the most exciting composers writing today, including Martin Suckling, Monica Max West, Artem Vassiliev, Patrick Nunn, Milton Mermikides, Tod Machover, Joby Talbot, Howard Goodall, Richard Sisson, John Metcalfe, Max Richter, Philip Sheppard, Sally Beamish, Thomas Hewitt Jones and Jenny Olivia Johnston.
Peter’s passion for audience development and digital integration in the arts have led to invitations to perform and speak at conferences around the world, including the #140conf Los Angeles, London and New York, FOWA London and The Art of Digital Symposium.
In 2010, he will return to The Juilliard School of Music to talk on "Classical Music in the Age of Pop" and perform and speak at The University of Maryland.
Peter Gregson plays a 1987 Colin Irving acoustic cello and a blue five string electric cello made for him by Eric Jensen in Seattle. Future performances through 2010 include the MIT Media Lab, Twitter HQ (San Francisco) The Roundhouse (London), The Future Gallery (London), The 92nd St Y (New York), The LAB (New York) The Queen's Hall (Edinburgh) and Kings Place (London), as well as his new, monthly alt-classical series at The Hospital Club.
Terminal was recorded for the Bowers & Wilkins Society of Sound at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios. A lot of these tracks were conceptualized in airport lounges, waiting to board planes and this was, initially, where the title for the album came from. The closing track was always going to be called “+” for reasons explained later, but my co-writer and producer Milton Mermikides pointed out that if the first track was called “-”, then it also formed a battery terminal, and so it stuck.
Inspiration was taken from singers, classical and pop. I think the human voice and the cello are very closely linked, and I wanted to play with this concept in the album, right down to occasionally processing the electric cello as if it were a vocal line on a pop record, or using vibrato in Orb, for example, as an opera singer might use it. Most importantly, the overriding ambition was to make sure that every sound you hear is a cello; it might be electric, it might be acoustic, it might be a mixture, but it’s all cello!
On the production side, there’s a mixture of analogue and digital processing - be it a plate reverb, an aggressive pitch shift plugin or a series of Studer tape machines… it’s been the highlight of my career to date, easily the most creative and inspirational week I’ve spent working, and all thanks to the incredible people at Real World and B&W. The vision of the Society of Sound project, to create the highest technical recordings, discover interesting music and deliver it to the members is, to my mind, one of the most viable routes to a sustainable and continued music industry.
“-” is an industrial lament. Perhaps an odd choice for the opening of an album, but for me it is the perfect introduction to these pieces: it’s elegiac and hopeful, a mix of electric and acoustic cellos, using extended and regular techniques, digital processing and analogue delays. In its short life, I hope it sets up the rest of the album in a satisfyingly expositional manner without giving away the whole story…
“Orb” is a lullaby of sorts. It starts out clearly enough, but then a second voice enters, throwing a spanner in the works for a simple melody, and it turns into a soprano conversation that struggles to resolve, as neither gives way. Simply four acoustic cellos, this was recorded with the binaural head with the same technique as Cello Counterpoint.