Pete Wareham

The main thrust of Pete Wareham’s (b. 1972) compositional approach is to ‘to create new genres,’ as exemplified through the jazz/punk of Acoustic Ladyland, which was awarded the BBC Jazz Award for Best Band 2005; the world/funk/punk/pop of Melt Yourself Down; and as a member of the jazz/electronica group Polar Bear. Heavily steeped in his research of Nubian and Algerian music, Wareham describes Melt Yourself Down as an effort ‘to shrink the world and try to create a one-world, all-genre dance/pop music.’ Wareham has toured extensively with Melt Yourself Down, playing venues from Leeds to Ljubljana to Rome to New York. In recent years, he has also embarked on several exciting solo projects which take an interdisciplinary, post-modern approach to classical composition, engaging quotidian sounds as musical instruments. The music in Chair Film (2012) is composed of the sounds of a stool hitting an upright piano—collaborating with friends he made an accompanying video. He has recently begun another exciting musical endeavour, Sawdust Samba, made up of recordings of carpentry machinery. Wareham looks forward to the release of the third Melt Yourself Down album on The Leaf Label in 2016. He is currently the Course Leader on BIMM London’s BA (Hons) Creative Musicianship and has recently been working as musical or artistic director for various community music projects—Orchestra ONE, The Green Light Project, Motion Sound Lab and the (Im)Possibilities Orchestra.