Charlie Hooper Williams is a musician, composer, and producer. If you dont know his work, it could be described as – immersive, transportive and deeply atmospheric. He crafts sonic landscapes that feel both deeply personal and expansively cinematic. Whilst moving fluidly between ambient, electronic, and classical influences, he creates compositions that evoke emotion and atmosphere in equal measure. The relationship between sound and space is central to his work—how music shapes perception, alters mood, and exists beyond the constraints of genre. His approach is rooted in curiosity and a commitment to storytelling through sound. However, his work doesn’t just sit in the background; it invites the listener in, offering moments of stillness, tension, and release.
Charlie’s ability to blur the lines between sound and emotion makes his music feel as much like an experience as it does a composition. Whether crafting intricate arrangements or allowing space for organic improvisation, his work is a study in contrast—delicate yet powerful, structured yet fluid.
In this conversation, he shares insights into his creative world, offering a glimpse into the inspirations, techniques, and philosophies that shape his sound. We explore the inspirations that drive his music, his creative process, and how he balances structure with improvisation. We also discuss the evolving role of technology in composition, the power of collaboration, and what’s next on the horizon for this ever-exploring artist.
Charlie hooper Williams Q&A
Beginnings in Music – What first drew you to the piano? Was there a particular moment or person that made you realise this was something you wanted to pursue seriously?
The piano I grew up with was an ancient upright that my parents had bought from their landlord around the time I was born. I would open it up and directly play the strings inside, making up soundscapes before I ever had lessons. When we moved (from Minnesota to Colorado) my sister and I started lessons, and as my family moved around we bounced between teachers.
I always enjoyed playing but didn’t take it super seriously until fairly late: my last teacher in high school told me I needed to practice on a proper piano, and gave me a key to her house so I could come over and play on her grand piano whenever I wanted. This was a huge vote of confidence on her part, and knowing someone took me seriously enough to offer it motivated me in turn to make it worth her while in terms of my playing.
Around the same time, I started accompanying rehearsals for a local production of Jesus Christ Superstar. That was getting thrown in the deep end in terms of sight-reading! I played in the pit orchestra for the shows as well— my first professional gig. I didn’t know about invoicing, though, I just expected them to hand me cash or something? So I never got paid for that one in the end. It was still a great experience, though: it was a new style of music, working on a big project with other people, and meeting lots of new friends. At university I accompanied a production of Sweeney Todd, which was my first exposure to the genius of Sondheim. (For a while I even wanted to be a conductor, but ultimately that’s a different skill set.) A lot of that music informs the textures I still use today in my composing.
While I was at university my high school piano teacher died suddenly— she was very young, 36 I think— and that drove home the fragility of life, and made me want to forge my own path, to make her proud in a way. She was very influential, I still think about her a lot.
Early Influences – Who were your biggest musical influences growing up? Did you find inspiration more from classical composers, or were there other genres and artists that shaped your approach?
When I was very young I would tape music off the radio that I liked— I never knew what any of it was, I would just sit on the floor and wait until I heard a sound that I needed to capture, and then hit “record”. I rarely listened back to anything, it was more about deciding which sounds I wanted to bottle up! I’m sure it was everything from the Beatles to Tchaikovsky, although when I was very young I didn’t much care for vocal music, I preferred instrumental. So I suppose that’s in keeping with me ending up as a pianist!
I’ve had wide-ranging tastes, but with some large gaps— I didn’t know Paul Simon’s “Graceland” until about 10 years ago, for example, which is madness: that’s one of the top 5 albums ever.
I was big into Radiohead as a teen, and it’s been great following Jonny Greenwood as he strikes out into solo composition and film soundtrack work. When “In Rainbows” came out it was so exciting to realise what a great album it was, in real time, while listening to it for the first time.
You were a prizewinner at the International Shostakovich Piano Competition. What was that experience like, and how did it shape your musical development?
The Shostakovich Competition was an amazing experience— it took place in St Petersburg, Russia, which was on its own such a life-changing trip. The US delegation arrived a week or so before the competition, to settle in and see some sights. This was during the “white nights” and we were all young, so we’d head out in the middle of the night and watch the midnight sun at a smoke-filled rooftop restaurant, and then wake up to practice the next morning. I’m very glad to have had the experience, things there are in some ways very different but in other ways just the same, specifically similar to America, maybe because of them being cast opposite each other in the Cold War. Our translators were a joy: one was a former Soviet engineer, glasses held together with tape, and the other was a beautiful fatalist who wouldn’t wear a bike helmet or seatbelt because “if I die, I die”.
The way a piano competition traditionally works is that you play four pieces, one from each major style period: Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and “20th Century”. Your typical classical pianist, though, isn’t super interested in 20th-century music, and to be fair, most 20th-century repertoire isn’t great competition material! So the standard move is to pick essentially a Romantic piece written in 1902, so it’s technically 20th Century, but you get to play two Romantic pieces! Win-win, but also kind of a cop-out.
I was very into ‘rocking the boat’ at that stage of life— not at all strategically, and often not to my benefit. So what I did, of course, was to enter a Scriabin sonata from 1903 as my “Romantic” work (it’s arguably Romantic, I guess?) and Fredric Rzewski’s Piano Piece No. 4 from 1977 as my 20th-century piece. That piece is very theatrical, moving clouds of repeated notes across the entire range of the piano and mixing in a Chilean-style folk melody from time to time. I wanted to do the inverse of what the typical competitor would do.
As an aside, the competition piano was one of these Bechsteins that doesn’t go all the way up to the highest C, it stops on the A below that. But the Rzewski starts on the missing B— so I had to do some real-time recomposing to start on the A, play the first section transposed relative to the A, and then smoothly bring it into the proper key. I don’t think anyone noticed?
Anyway, the judges were impressed and I think grateful that at least one competitor didn’t pull the “two Romantic pieces” trick. My performance of Bach at the semifinals was frankly shocking, so unsurprisingly I didn’t place overall, but they made up a “new music prize” on the spot for me as an honour “for bringing new music into our competition”. I was (and remain) very flattered.
A related story: I met my wife because of that piece. I had got to know Rzewski at a composers retreat with the American ensemble eighth blackbird, and I was meeting him for dinner in his adopted hometown of Brussels as a stopover after a “finding myself” overland trip in Africa. We were staying at the same youth hotel— she was doing a similar trip backpacking around Europe— and we kept in touch, and eventually got together. So I suppose you could say the competition shaped my non-musical life even more than my musical one, in the end.
At some point, you moved away from the classical concert pianist route and started experimenting with new sounds and technologies. What prompted that shift?
Alongside music, I’ve always been into tech. I love making machines do new things, including computers. Some of this comes out in straightforward ways, like recording and producing my own albums. But I’m also always looking for what’s unexplored— what’s possible, but no one’s done it yet? So one of those things is using algorithms to create visuals in real time, and having them driven in specifically musical ways. Lots of people are doing things with visuals at shows, and I really like a lot of it, but it’s usually either just video playback, or it’s reacting to the entirety of the sound, like the kick drum makes the screen pulse for example.
The core idea of my visuals is that I can segment out, for example, just the melody and have each note of the melody appear in a different place on the screen, and then have the accompaniment be doing something else. I want to be able to show things the way we actually hear them, not restricted by anything technical.
I have also pretty strongly turned my back on what I call “institutional new music” — the sort of thing that gets you tenure (maybe) but isn’t much listened to for pleasure. Unfortunately that kind of music still gets quite a lot of public funding, based I think on the idea that it represents “progress” or is culturally important in some way. It’s not progressive and hasn’t been for about 70 years at this point, so I don’t think it deserves any special treatment in terms of cultural weight, prestige, or funding. More personally, I didn’t want to be part of that— one of the most important things about music is that it connects emotionally with an audience. I needed my music to do that, so I left the academic scene and started writing in my own style.
You’ve lived in very different environments from Minnesota’s Iron Range to Chicago, Cambridge, and now Bath. Do you think your surroundings influence your compositions?
Everything influences everything! But maybe it’s hard to say exactly how. I think the specific, immediate environment I’m working in probably has more effect than which city I’m in— most of my 2022 album Say You’re With Me was written at the “piano shed” in Berlin, and some of my oldest pieces were written at a residency outside of Chicago called Ragdale. And the rest is at home in Bath. All of those have big windows letting in lots of sun, maybe I’m solar-powered?
There is a big role of memory in composing: even though it’s been decades since I lived in Minnesota’s north woods, I think the memory of that rich spaciousness is there when I’m writing.
Your music is often described as soulful, richly layered and masterfully understated. How would you describe your own sound, and how has it changed over time?
Those are nice adjectives to have placed on me! I do think ‘understated’ is something I aim for— I put a lot of details into my music, but it doesn’t need to feel ornamented or complex. One of my most popular pieces is “The River’s Tent Is Broken”, which is so still and quiet, hardly anything happens! But the things that do happen are the right ones, and so it’s a strong piece.
I think as I develop as a composer I’m getting better at only putting in the necessary notes, while still keeping things dynamic and exciting.
The Harmonics Machine & Infinite Resonator – You’ve built your own machines to shape and expand the piano’s sound. What led you to develop these, and how do they work in your compositions?
I’m always looking for ways to make new sounds— this has been the case since I was a little kid banging around inside my parents’ upright piano. And I’m a magpie about stealing things other instruments can do: I’ve always been envious of string players having access to the magical sound of harmonics, and being able to sustain and swell on a held note. Of course, you can play harmonics on the piano, but that usually takes one hand, meaning you only have one hand left to play the keys! I wanted to be able to play harmonics as part of a piece using both hands. From some initial ideas I teamed up with Bristol-based inventor/genius Drew Batchelor, and we worked together to make the Harmonics Machine. The Infinite Resonator came from conversations with Sam Underwood of Bristol’s Pervasive Media Studio— he had done something similar and very generously shared what he’d discovered as I developed something that could feed the piano’s sound back into itself.
The Shazam Detour – You briefly stepped into the tech world to help develop Shazam. How did that happen, and did working in tech influence the way you think about music?
I got in touch with Shazam at the end of my MPhil degree at Cambridge. I was still finding my feet here in the UK and needed visa sponsorship, which is why I started looking at the tech world in the first place. I had built a game called SingSmash, which you controlled by singing— the idea was to make a game that was more musical than Guitar Hero / Rock Band, where you actually produced sounds yourself. They liked it and brought me on to a really great team where I learned a lot about software development and working on complex projects. It never gets old making something and then having hundreds of millions of people using it just a few days later!
Performance vs. Composition – When you’re composing, do you think about how a piece will feel to perform? Or do you separate the two processes entirely?
I’m very much an “at the piano” composer, so they’re always interlinked. I often have ideas away from the piano, whether they’re for a new piece or for a change within something I’m writing at the moment. But I generally go play it at the piano, hear it in the real world and see what it feels like in my fingers, before I write it down. I think there’s a bit of romanticism around composers who just write straight from their heads, Mozart-like, but for me there’s no real benefit to that.
What’s Next? – What’s on the horizon for you? Any upcoming projects, collaborations, or new experiments you’re excited about?
I’ve just released an EP of solo piano versions on Way Beyond Music— my first release on a proper label! It’s been great working with them to rebrand under my own name (rather than Larkhall) and to get the music on various radio stations and playlists.
I’ve finished the next LP and am thrilled with it. I’m performing these tunes in the upcoming live shows, and the album will come out later this year. I also run a concert series in Bristol and Bath called Postclassical Assembly, presenting other artists in this genre. We’ve been fortunate to get support from the PRS Foundation and are putting together some exciting shows for 2025 and 2026.
Finally, among my upcoming concerts I have a series of shows in beautiful outdoor locations. We’re calling it “Piano For All Seasons”, and it’s going to be really special.