Rotterdam, Netherlands
A new wave of music rolls in
OLIVER COATES is probably a little weary of being described as Radiohead’s “secret weapon,” though the British cellist and composer’s work with the London Contemporary Orchestra added much of what charged the band’s 2016 album, A Moon Shaped Pool. He might be equally tired of being known for his work with Massive Attack or, indeed, his reputation as a Hollywood musician; he played Mica Levi’s compositions for the film Under the Skin in 2013, and, yes, those are his strings on the scores for There Will Be Blood (2007) and The Master (2012). Coates is an interesting enough proposition in himself. He graduated with the highest grades ever awarded by the Royal Academy of Music, served as artist in residence at the Southbank Centre in London, and has released two stunning solo albums—2013’s Towards the Blessed Islands and last year’s Upstepping, which sampled, reworked and re-conjured the sounds of the cello to make something that leaned toward electronica, techno and house. On May 19, he unveils Shorelines, a music-theater piece that commemorates the 1953 North Sea Flood: a devastating storm surge that occurred when a cold January sea swept over the flood defenses of coastal towns and villages in the Netherlands, England, Scotland and Belgium, claiming more than 2,000 lives.
The piece—which focuses on the true story of a young mother called Peggy Morgan, who lived on Canvey Island in the Thames Estuary and lost her whole family in the flood—took Coates a while to work out. He shaped his ideas by spending time by the sea in Suffolk, on the east coast of England, and reading the English poet Alice Oswald, whose work, he tells me, “helped both in terms of brilliant individual lines, meditations on water itself, but also larger structural patterns.” Earlier this year, The New York Times placed Remain Calm, Coates’s collaborative EP with Mica Levi, on its list of the “25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music Is Going.” But never mind whom he’s worked with: A musician as eager to talk about poetry as he is the electronic duo Autechre, the Greek god Proteus and the joys of playing the cello standing up is surely worth listening to all on his own.