Oscar Powell, who goes by his last name Powell, is a British electronic musician, composer and producer based in London. He co-founded Diagonal label with Jaime Williams in 2011 and established a ƒolder multimedia audio-visual platform. From November 2013 to June 2019, Powell hosted a monthly online show, Melon Magic, on NTS Radio. In his recent works, Oscar Powell departed from experimentations with techno and other "dance" genres toward more abstract and conceptual music. He searches for inspiration in systems theory, mathematics, Iannis Xenakis' stochastic processes, Deleuzian philosophy, and imitating natural phenomena in composition and synthesis.
In 2011, Powell presented his debut 12" EP on a newly-launched label Diagonal. In 2013, Oscar Powell had more 12" records on other labels, including Liberation Technologies and Boomkat's limited edition imprint The Death Of Rave. Powell began gaining prominence for his highly-unusual DJ/live performances. In May 2014, Diagonal Records had a room at the "Leitmotif 002" event, organized at London's Corsica Studios. Five DJ sets by the label's artists were later documented on Diagonal Rave Tapes 5xCassette boxset from the Reel Torque label. Powell began extensively collaborating and performing with other artists, including Russell Haswell, Karl O'Connor and Lorenzo Senni.
In early 2015, Powell got signed by XL Recordings, starting with a release of Sylvester Stallone 12". His second single, Insomniac, contained a sample of Steve Albini introducing a song from Big Black's Pigpile '92 album. When Powell contacted Albini to request the sample clearance, he received a disgruntled email from Steve, stating he always "detested mechanized dance music and its stupid simplicity." He provided Powell blanket permission to sample anything, stressing he couldn't possibly care less and further ranting about his hatred towards this kind of electronic music. Powell asked permission to use the said email for promotion, and Albini granted it with yet another remark, "still don't care." Finally, XL Recordings rented a massive billboard on Commercial Street in London and printed Albini's entire email to advertise Powell's single, generating notable publicity. In October 2016, Oscar's debut full-length 2xLP/CD album, Sport, came out.
The artist continued releasing music on Diagonal and celebrated the label's fifth anniversary in 2016 by performing across North America with Not Waving and Russell Haswell. In 2018, Powell began working together and playing live with German artist Wolfgang Tillmans. They released a limited edition Spoken By The Other 12" EP at XL Recordings. In May 2020, Powell launched his new ambitious project, a multimedia cross-genre platform a ƒolder, in collaboration with Swiss filmmaker Michael Amstad, Norwegian visual artist Marte Eknæs and veteran cross-disciplinary artist Mathias Gmachl from Austria. Oscar Powell released two full-length albums and several AV works on the platform.
In July 2021, Powell got signed by Editions Mego and released his next album, Piano Music 1-7 CD/LP. Oscar Powell devised a new compositional method, applying stochastic functions not just to control sound variables ("wave-shapes," FM parameters, frequency or filter modes) but to generate visual scores compatible with any software/MIDI instrument. He used a generic Grand Steinway sampler as a "placeholder" instrument, eventually building seven distinct "synthetic piano" compositions around these sounds.
