Composer Oliver Coates on the cello, chaos and connection: ‘The best music is out there in nature’

He has been hired by Radiohead, Steve McQueen and Charlotte Wells for Aftersun. But the British prodigy is less interested in virtuosity than connection – and chasing an ineffable ‘shimmer’

When Oliver Coates was 19 or so, he got a job playing cello on a cruise ship. “Quite a bow tie, buttoned-up kind of space,” he recalls. The ensemble would be playing The Swan by Camille Saint-Saëns, a very slow, sad piece. As the boat rocked, Coates had to work out how to lean into his instrument to counterbalance the sway. “I remember thinking, God, this is technique!” he says with typical verve. After his shifts, he would return to his cabin to “get stress relief through doing my Aphex-y glitchy music, and that was my fun”.

It is a very literal early example of the slippage, as he likes to call it, that defines Coates’ endlessly fertile approach to music. His cello-based solo releases have spanned deconstructions of the UK pirate radio that he listened to in the family car as a teenage music obsessive in Wandsworth (2016’s Upstepping) to Low-influenced incursions into the outer reaches of static and saturation (2020’s Skins n Slime). He has performed with magicians and on the top tier of a swimming pool diving tower. A key collaborator on Jonny Greenwood’s soundtrack work, he also led the London Contemporary Orchestra (of which he was once principal cellist) on Radiohead’s last album, A Moon Shaped Pool. He’s collaborated with Mica Levi and has recently become an in-demand soundtracker himself, most notably on the swimmy, heady score for Charlotte Wells’s Oscar-nominated 2022 film Aftersun.