An English experimental musician and engineer working since the late 1970s: founder of ICR, the studio hand at the heart of Nurse With Wound, and a quiet anchor of the UK underground.
Colin Potter is the English experimental musician, engineer and producer the Bureau files at Tier II as a central figure of the UK DIY and post-industrial underground. Born in York in 1952 and latterly based in London, he began making unusual music in the late 1970s within the tape underground, the DIY culture that grew up as an alternative to the mainstream, and has worked in electronic and experimental music for over thirty-five years, as much behind the desk as in front of it.
The foundation is ICR. In 1981 Potter set up the label, Integrated Circuit Recordings, and IC Studio, beginning with a clutch of his own small-run home cassettes and growing into a catalogue that blurred post-punk, crude pop, Krautrock-inspired drone and electronica. The roster ranged from DIY figures like The Instant Automatons through Chris & Cosey, the composer Trevor Wishart, the drone-soundists Andrew Chalk and Darren Tate, and Bryn Jones's Muslimgauze, mapping a wide stretch of the British and Continental fringe. Both label and studio are still running decades on.
His best-known work is with Nurse With Wound. Potter first worked with the group on Thunder Perfect Mind in 1992, recorded at his ICR studio, and has appeared on almost every NWW release since; for a long stretch the project was effectively the core duo of Steven Stapleton and Potter. His contribution there is the kind that resists the word engineer: the mixing and sound-processing are compositional acts, and the records bear his hand as much as Stapleton's. He was also the one who persuaded NWW back to live performance in 2005, and has played in the live line-up ever since.
For a decade from the late 1990s his studio, housed in a Victorian water tower outside Preston, became a focal point for the nascent UK drone scene, the place musicians working beneath the radar came to record. From that base he built long working relationships with Current 93, The Hafler Trio, Organum, Andrew Chalk, Jonathan Coleclough, Ora and Fovea Hex, projects on which his role was integral rather than incidental.
Through all of it he has kept his own catalogue going. It runs from early-1980s home recordings such as The Scythe (1981), since vinyl-reissued, where his taste for Krautrock, dub and noisy electronics is already plain, to recent rhythm-led records like Rank Sonata and The Abominable Slowman. He began performing solo in 1999 and has toured Europe and the US since.
The Bureau files Colin Potter at Artists · Tier II as a quiet anchor of the British experimental underground: a significant label founder, a sought engineer and producer, and the studio-and-creative partner without whom the modern Nurse With Wound would sound markedly different.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the postwar · last revised c. the Anthropocene