2015 Film Music Prize of FONDATION SUISA goes to Peter Scherer

«Peter Scherer creates a power and urgency without compare through his film music for Dark Star – HR Giger's World – even in scenes with the shortest and most sparing use of music. Nobody can resist Peter Scherer's film music.» (2015 Music Film Prize jury)

This year, FONDATION SUISA is honouring one of the figureheads of Swiss film music, an adept with many years of experience and international proven successes. Peter Scherer from Zurich will be receiving the prize, worth CHF 25,000, for the best original film music of the year for his score to the documentary film Dark Star – HR Giger's World.
 
The film is a portrait of this master of dark surrealism, who died in 2014, at a time when he was already suffering health-wise. It is thus no wonder that HR Giger is rather reserved and taciturn during the 95-minute documentary by Belinda Sallin. Through the sensitive use of music, Peter Scherer has managed to create an additional bridge between the viewer and the protagonist, without prescribing a specific direction or even using any clichés.

«Music in films has a special ability to use subtle relationships and emotional emphasis in a way that goes beyond the visual media», says the prize-winner.

The jury also acknowledged the synthesis of Giger's work and Scherer's music. The sometimes electronic, sometimes acoustic sounds blend with the fantastic images of HR Giger's domestic environment in Zurich Oerlikon. Enlightening and at the same time alarming, fascinating and complex, just like Giger's art.

Peter Scherer is a pianist and guitar player. He was born in 1953 in Zurich. He received his diploma in piano in 1977 at the Basel Conservatory and then studied theory and composition at the Hamburg School for Music and Performing Arts. In 1980 he moved to New York, where he took a particular interest in electronic music and founded the noise-pop duo Ambitious Lovers. Peter Scherer worked together with artists such as Laurie Anderson, Arto Lindsay, Caetano Veloso, John Zorn and Bill Frisell as a studio muisician, producer or arranger. From the the end of the 1980ies he has regularly written music for dance and multimedia projects. He moved back to his home city of Zurich in 2010 where he now lives, concentrating primarily on film music. He first received the Film Music Prize of the FONDATION SUISA in 2007 for his compositions in the feature film Marmorera (directed by Markus Fischer). One of his most famous works is the music to Markus Imhof's More Than Honey, for which Peter Scherer was awarded the Swiss Film Prize for the best music in 2013.

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