Lewis Gill (musician)

Lewis Gill is an English composer and musician, who has worked in the contemporary classical, electronica, art rock and experimental music areas.

Born in Warrington in 1968 (and a long-term resident of the town’s Latchford neighbourhood), Gill initially worked as an electric guitarist in a succession of Warrington-based projects, many of these alongside fellow guitarist and experimenter Ian Simpson.

Gill currently cites Arnold Schoenberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Steve Reich and 1970s progressive rock as his main influences.

The group operated between the late 1990s and 2006, and collaborated with Lol Coxhill.

Other group members included Harry Gallimore, Neil Packer, Misha Gray, Tim Lyons, Ollie Brice and Dave Jackson.

Gill and Simpson initially played together in the art-rock band Cheeky Atom (who released a single mini-album called Jodrell Bank, Here We Come in 1994, blending a fairly conventional guitar-based line-up with avant-garde experimentation including textural work and the incorporation of vacuum cleaners).

The record gained the approval of Karlheinz Stockhausen, who wrote back to Gill after being sent a CD.

Gill and Simpson subsequently formed the electronic experimental improvising group Psychiatric Challenge.

Along with another Psychiatric Challenge collective member, Neil Packer, Gill formed the studio-based Vivahead project, who released a succession of albums on their own Pulper Music label during the early 2000s, inspired by abstract electronica, jazz and drum and bass.

Both Gill and Simpson were in the art-rock/noise rock project Sebastian, which released a lone album, Hew Hoppers Base, on CDr on the Burning Shed label in 2002.

He also teamed up with Warrington fusion guitarist Tony Harn to form the experimental duo Resindust, who released one eponymous album in 2002.

In the early 2020s Gill made the switch from performing to full-time contemporary classical composing, and is currently writing and releasing an ongoing series of orchestral and chamber pieces via YouTube videos, all currently realised via synthetic instruments with the hope of producing subsequent versions with live acoustic instrumentation.

Several of Gill's pieces are named after places in the Warrington area, such as Stockton Heath, Culcheth, Lymm, Bewsey, Westy, Orford, Padgate, Dallam and Grasmere.

In an interview with The Warrington Guardian, he admitted "I love Warrington and I like the idea of it being put on the map, so I thought why not write a piece of music and name it after a place I’ve spent a lot of time in and been inspired by?"

A CD release of Gill's existing compositions is planned for a 2024 release, under the title of Parochial Chamber Works – Music Inspired by Warrington (Volume 1).