Film music prize to Peter Scherer
Peter Scherer won the Suisa Foundation Film Music Prize for the music he composed for the film "Dark Star - the world of HR Giger". The prize was awarded for the first time in the "documentary film" category.
This year, the Suisa Foundation honored a brilliant exponent of Swiss film music, with long experience and an international track record. Zurich-born Peter Scherer was awarded the CHF 25,000 prize for the best film score of the year, for his compositions for the documentary Dark Star - the world of HR Giger, by Belinda Sallin. With his sensitive musical interventions, Peter Scherer was able to create an additional link between the observer and the protagonist, without imposing a certain direction or even falling into clichés.
The jury also paid tribute to the successful symbiosis between Giger's work and Scherer's music. Sometimes electronic, sometimes acoustic, the sounds blend with the fantastic pictorial universe of Giger's familiar Zurich-Oerlikon environment. Sounds that are both luminous and frightening, fascinating and multidimensional.
Peter Scherer is a pianist and guitarist. Born in Zurich in 1953, he obtained his piano diploma from the Basel Conservatory in 1977, and went on to study music theory and composition at the Hamburg College of Music and Dramatic Arts. In 1980, he moved to New York, where he devoted himself to electronic music and founded the noise-pop duo Ambitious Lovers. A studio musician, producer and arranger, Peter Scherer has worked with artists such as Laurie Anderson, Arto Lindsay, Caetano Veloso, John Zorn and Bill Frisell. Since the late 80s, he has regularly composed music for dance and multimedia projects. Since 2010, Peter Scherer has been living back in his native Zurich, where he now concentrates mainly on film music.
