Dr Daniel Gouly is a clarinetist, educator, sound designer, composer and performer with an MA in Music (Ethnomusicology and Performance) from SOAS, University of London and a PhD from the Open University, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He specialises in performing musics from across Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, and has studied with, and played alongside, legendary Klezmer musicians such as Alan Bern, Frank London, Merlin Shepherd, Christian Dawid, and Joel Rubin, as well significant figures from other traditions such as Manos Achalinotopoulos. Currently he performs with the award-winning Don Kipper, an explosive ensemble drawing from both modern electronic Romani club music and bone-deep rural folk traditions who perform at festivals and concerts across the UK and Europe. Since 2013, they have performed as the BBC Introducing act at WOMAD released their first three albums, featured on BBC Radio 3 and the BBC World Service, played two European Tours, won the titles of both the Moshe Beregovski Award for best Klezmer Newcomers and World Music Network’s Battle of the Bands, and been nominated for Best Fusion Act in the Songlines World Music Awards. The ensemble has also been lauded in the press nationally and internationally, and their most recent album Seven Sisters, received particularly strong reviews including 4-star reviews from the Guardian, Songlines, the Evening Standard and the FT, and featuring as World Album of the Month in the Guardian. They’ve also had significant national and international radio play including BBC Radio 3, BBC World Service, Jazz FM, BBC Radio 6 Music, YLE RADIO 1 (Finland National Radio), Mapamundi Musica (Spain) and LA PREMIERE (Belgium), and have performed all across the UK and Europe, at festivals and venues including the Jazz Cafe, Southbank Centre, Rich Mix, King’s Place, WOMAD, Shambala, Wilderness, Buskers Bern, Neuchatel, Tres Culturas, Horizonte, and Mandrea Festival.

One of Daniel’s most recent projects, ‘Steps Beyond the Shanghai Ghetto: Chinese-Jewish Collaborations in Modernity,’ supported by Arts Council England, explores the intersection of electronic music and Chinese and Jewish folk music traditions alongside NYC-based sound artist, composer, and vocalist Lemon Guo. This project acts as a meditation on historical Chinese-Jewish relations, centred around the story of the Shanghai Ghetto that Jews escaped to during the Shoah, based on archival research, and using innovative methods to combine traditional folk music with binaural field recordings and new composition. Their work together began at the Making Tracks 2020 Digital Fellowship for exceptional young musicians working in traditional music. Daniel’s half of the project draws on parts of the Klezmer repertoire historically played at the most culturally/religiously significant parts of Ashkenazi Jewish life and, in combination with Lemon’s fieldwork research in folk music in rural China, their music brings together the sacred and the secular, the rural and the urban, the ancient and contemporary, in ways that create a profoundly new and vivid musical practice at the intersection of Ashkenazi Jewish and Chinese diaspora culture. Working remotely from their respective studios in London and Fujian they have also completed a number of composition and sound design commissions, including drawing on modern classical, electroacoustic music, soundscapes, and our respective traditions, to underscore the work of award-winning artist Kunlin He for the 2021 Asian Art Biennale (Taiwan). Our work will also be heard on a forthcoming score for Eris Qian’s ‘Last Ship East’, an evocative story of an 8-year-old Jewish girl on an ocean liner to Shanghai who struggles with her friendship with a young Japanese girl as her family prepares for Passover under the threat of oppression from the Axis powers. Drawing on developments in this project Daniel also recently completed a solo commission for electronics, clarinet, and voice for The Centre for Jewish Studies at The University of Manchester as part of their '50 Jewish Objects' series. This culminated in an album of compositions and poetry inspired by the mystical text the Sefer ha-Peli'ah, ‘The Book of Wonder’ which will now augment the university’s Judaica library.

Daniel also loves connecting music and and other art forms, such as theatre, through his work across the UK, the US, and Europe with Bubble Schmeisis, Oily Cart’s Jamboree and Sound Symphony, Make A Scene’s Esther’s Journey, in addition to writing a diverse range of music for Puppetry. With Bubble Schmeisis, a comic and poignant piece that examines identity, masculinity, and intimacy, Daniel has played across the UK and Europe, including a sold-out, site-specific run in Detroit supported by the University of Michigan musical society, 2014 recipients of the National Medal of Arts. Over the last three years he has worked with theatre company Oily Cart as a composer, sound designer, and performer, developing the multi-sensory shows ‘Jamboree’ and ‘Sound Symphony’ that engage children with complex needs as co-composers, touring across the UK to arts centres, theatres, and schools. During lockdown these shows were repurposed, creating pop-up doorstep performances for those shielding from Covid-19, working alongside professional disabled and non-disabled musicians to deliver musical experiences to children with some of the biggest barriers to experiencing culture in-person. Daniel has augmented this experience with the theatre company Make A Scene devising a new ACE-funded show for 7-14 year olds with PMLD that combines sensory work, sound design, and new composition, and drawing on a range of European and Mediterranean sounds, to create a playful piece that examines journeys across the continent.

Daniel’s academic work examines how trial and error, peer and institutional learning, the design and nature of technologies, and a range of other factors shape how underground hip-hop musicians in the UK learn to programme music technology, develop musical style, and acquire other forms of knowledge. His research programme included conducting exhaustive interviews and running studio sessions with producers (both in person and remotely), and engaging his informants as active agents in his research alongside other more unusual methodologies. These included designing commercial sample packs to examine the kinds of knowledge woven into music technologies; work he continues to pursue professionally with his sound design and composition for Mode Audio.

“Transcendental soloing”

Songlines

"Impressively original"

**** The Guardian

"Unstoppable"

**** The Evening Standard