Paul Schütze

A boundless creative spirit, Paul Schütze has worked for over forty years as a musician, photographer, visual artist and perfumer. He has exhibited at institutions such as the Hayward Gallery, the V&A and Madrid’s Arco, held residencies at the Cité des Arts in Paris and has works in collections worldwide. He has collaborated with musicians from Jah Wobble to Toshinori Kondo, from Bill Laswell to David Toop, and worked both as a filmscore composer and music critic in print.

Born in Melbourne, Schütze left art school prematurely and worked in a factory to fund the purchase of his first synthesiser. Aged 21, he co-formed the legendary Australian experimental / industrial band Laughing Hands, whose success sadly and suddenly vanished at the hands of an unscrupulous record distributor defrauding the young musicians on the brink of a career peak. Embattled, but not defeated, Schütze began again. His next musical life came as a composer of filmscore, winning the AFI award for best score for his first feature The Tale Of Ruby Rose in 1987, while 1985’s Deus Ex Machina (the sound design for an eponymous exhibition co-curated by Schütze) is now considered the first true solo work in the sizable Paul Schütze canon. Now beginning to focus on his own expression alongside commissioned work, Schütze relocated to London in late 1992, welcomed by a burgeoning community of artists and musicians at a time of immense creative fertility. The stream of releases that followed, under his own name and under various pseudonyms and aliases, began to confirm an important new voice in experimental music, in Australian electronic music, and in early ambient music.