Simon Fisher Turner

British composer, sound designer, and actor Simon Fisher Turner has pursued numerous paths across his extended, many-sided career. In a trajectory reminiscent of Scott Walker, he attained initial prominence as a pop performer while still a teenager, only to shift toward progressively experimental territory. After issuing a 1973 debut at the peak of his visibility as a television personality, he participated briefly in The The at the start of the 1980s before producing avant-pop under the guises of Deux Filles and Jeremy's Secret. Several acclaimed film scores for director Derek Jarman commenced with Caravaggio (1986). Fisher Turner also issued a pair of indie-pop albums in the late 1980s under the pseudonym the King of Luxembourg. Although occasional returns to pop occurred, such as the 1999 standalone project Loveletter, the bulk of his work has comprised soundtrack commissions and exploratory soundscapes, among them the disorienting assemblages of the 1990 Jarman score The Garden and the rhythm-oriented investigations of the 2000 Scanner collaboration Travelcard. Additional partners have encompassed Klara Lewis on 2018's Care and ceramicist/author Edmund de Waal on A Quiet Corner in Time (2020). The 2024 album Instability of the Signal presented sparse, detailed art-pop songs.

During his early years, when still credited as Simon Turner, he worked as a child television actor and cut a self-titled 1973 pop album along with several charting 45s—self-described as "appalling"—for UK Records and Ariola across the decade. He and Colin Lloyd Tucker later figured in the formative phase of The The, yet soon departed as a duo in 1982, issuing two albums as Deux Filles (two French girls) followed by one as Jeremy's Secret. Fisher Turner began his solo discography with the more experimental 1985 LP The Bone of Desire. His scoring work for Derek Jarman opened with the 1986 film Caravaggio and continued with the following year's The Last of England. Two further indie-pop albums appeared on Él, and he toured as the King of Luxembourg in the late 1980s, before signing to Creation for the release of 1990's Simon Turner, an experimental set sharing no resemblance to his identically titled debut.

Entering the 1990s, Fisher Turner established an enduring association with Daniel Miller's Mute label, encompassing further Jarman scores such as The Garden (1990) and Blue (1993) as well as the experimental pop of 1996's Shwarma. Later in the decade he recorded with Paul Kendall as Kendall Turner Overdrive on Displaced Links (1997), performed in the Hangovers—the band fronted by Gina Birch of the Raincoats—and produced the easy-listening pop album Beethoven Chopin Kitchen Fraud (1999) under the name Loveletter. Multi-year work with choreographer Rosemary Butcher yielded 1999's Still Moving Light, while live improvisations and the 2000 album Travelcard arose from performances with Robin Rimbaud (Scanner).

Sustaining his emphasis on film and experimental music, Fisher Turner issued sets such as the CD/DVD packages Swift (2002) and Lana Lara Lata (2005), the latter a group of soundscapes realized with French sound artist Rainier Lericolais and Italian electronica duo T uM'. Following sound design for Cynthia Beatt's 2009 essay film The Invisible Frame starring Tilda Swinton, he turned toward more conventional repertoire by producing British singer/songwriter Polly Scattergood's debut album.

The triple-album Soundtracks for Derek appeared in 2011, containing music created for Jarman's Super 8 exhibition at the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Düsseldorf, Germany. The next year brought a collaboration with Japanese artist Shiro Takatani plus concerts across Europe alongside the Elysian Quartet. Fisher Turner's score for the 1924 film The Epic of Everest was issued by Mute Records in 2013 and subsequently received an Ivor Novello Award. Giraffe, a sequence of processed field recordings and sound designs again featuring the Elysian Quartet, emerged on Editions Mego in 2017. The same imprint released the Klara Lewis collaboration Care, an LP of drones and field recordings, in 2018. In 2020 Mute brought out A Quiet Corner in Time, documenting audio for an installation at the Schindler House in Los Angeles realized by Fisher Turner and artist Edmund de Waal. Soleilmoon simultaneously issued Savage Songs of Brutality and Food. By the Extreme Angels of Parody., an experimental album Fisher Turner recorded with his children Isabella and Jasper.

Several limited cassettes surfaced in the early 2020s, together with two further Soleilmoon CDs, New Modern Music for Political Documentaries and Symphony of a Great City: Backing Track (both 2024). A return to Mute yielded Instability of the Signal, an album of minimalist, poetic pieces whose string arrangements were supplied by the Elysian Collective.