An American musician, composer, and producer named Peter Broderick has built an international profile through boundary-crossing solo work, joint ventures, and scores written for cinema and dance. Commanding a wide array of instruments and styles with equal facility, he has issued an extensive catalog on Bella Union, Erased Tapes, Staalplaat, and Beacon Sound while accumulating credits that touch nearly every corner of twenty-first-century independent, classical, and experimental music.
Raised in a musical home in Portland, Oregon, Broderick mastered multiple instruments before finishing high school and then worked as a session player, adding violin, banjo, musical saw, mandolin, and other parts to recordings by M. Ward, Zooey Deschanel, Dolorean, Norfolk & Western, and others. His first self-released EP, 4 Track Songs, surfaced in 2006. Contact made through MySpace introduced him to Danish band Efterklang, leading him to relocate to Copenhagen in mid-2007 to collaborate with the group. That same year Kning Disk released Docile, his earliest album of solo piano pieces. Float appeared on Erased Tapes and Hope on Bella Union in 2008. While based in Europe he worked with composers, singers, and songwriters that included Nils Frahm, Greg Haines, Laura Gibson, Yann Tiersen, Olafur Arnalds, and Lubomyr Melnyk.
Already busy as a session musician, engineer, and producer, Broderick nevertheless maintained a steady flow of his own EPs, singles, and film scores and accepted commissions for dance and theater. He supplied material for split releases such as 2009’s Blank Grey Canvas Sky with Machinefabriek, 2010’s Apple Bobbing At ___ with Penelope Joy, and 2011’s Glimmer with Takumi Uesaka. Bella Union issued the full-length How They Are in 2010. From that year onward the number of outside requests matched his own output; he appeared on nineteen recordings in 2010, twelve in 2011 (among them Oliveray’s Wonders, a project with Frahm), and ten more in 2012. He and Frahm also completed and released the first album of their three-year project http://www.itstartshear.com. (During this period the artist withdrew from all social media.) Additional 2012 releases included the EP Two Songs for Banjo and Voice and the single “I Will Play This Song Once Again” b/w “These Walls of Mine.”
Broderick remained equally active in 2013. Ten recordings that year featured contributions to Mark Kozelek and Jimmy Lavalle’s Perils from the Sea, Melnyk’s Corollaries, and Nadja’s Flipper. He also released the Broderick & Broderick EP, the full-length Float: 2013 Addendum, and the score for director Rodney Evans’ award-winning film The Happy Sad. The following year he returned to Portland for a time and played on albums by Portland Cello Project, Aidan Baker, Sharon Van Etten, and Sean Flinn & the Royal We. Erased Tapes issued the split dub set Greg Gives Peter Space with Haines, The Album Leaf (Featuring Peter Broderick) appeared as a self-release, and Beacon Sound released the self-titled Peter Broderick + Gabriel Saloman.
Although he performed on more than a dozen outside records in 2015, Broderick’s own recording and touring schedule stayed equally demanding. Working with French artist Félicia Atkinson as La Nuit he issued Desert Television, while the EPs X Luzern and COTN RMXD and the full-length Colours of the Night also appeared. In 2016 he recorded the spare piano-and-voice album Partners with Tucker Martine. (Drawing on John Cage’s writings, it included a reading of the composer’s “In a Landscape.”) He also produced Brigid Mae Power’s self-titled debut for Tompkins Square. The pair married soon afterward and moved to Ireland. Broderick maintained the same pace into 2017 with All Together Again, a collection of commissioned works from the preceding decade.
