Photo Credit: Raphaël Neal
Sam Wilson is a London-based percussionist and composer working predominantly across contemporary classical performance. He frequently adopts a collaborative and compositional role and has performed extensively in large-scale live orchestral projects and international film and television recordings alike. His work has taken him to concert halls, comedy clubs, stadiums and festivals around the world. He studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama where he was awarded the Lord Mayor’s Prize.
He is an artistic board member and principal player with Riot Ensemble and works regularly with the London Contemporary Orchestra as their principal percussionist. With Riot he has performed and co-devised works including Georg Friedrich Haas’s Solstices, an 85-minute work written for the ensemble and performed in pitch darkness, on which he later published an article in The Guardian. Large-scale orchestral collaborations have included appearances with Florence and the Machine and St. Vincent at the BBC Proms as part of the core band under the direction of Jules Buckley. In 2023, he helped devise and arrange the percussion for Sigur Rós’s international orchestral tour, performing percussion and piano in the first iteration of the show. At home in both large-scale orchestral formats and chamber settings, Sam has also collaborated with Colin Currie, Anoushka Shankar, Matt Calvert, Oliver Coates, GBSR Duo, Jess Gillam and 12 Ensemble.
His screen credits include performances in Black Panther, K-Pop: Demon Hunters, Bugonia and Hamnet. For Marvel Studios’ Deadpool and Wolverine he worked closely with composer Rob Simonsen to source and develop the metallic sound palette central to the score’s identity. He has enjoyed a long-term collaboration with Volker Bertelmann, collaborating across ten films to date, including All Quiet on the Western Front, for which Bertelmann won the Academy Award for Best Original Score.
Since 2010 he has worked closely with Anna Meredith in a long-standing creative partnership spanning co-written concert works (Brisk Widow for two drum kits and four spotlights, and Gigue for Konami Dance Mat), album recordings (including the Mercury Prize-nominated album FIBS), live band shows and film scores. He assisted arranging and programming the score for several live performances of Meredith’s score to Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, which he has gone on to perform at the Barbican and the BFI IMAX. Touring has taken the Anna Meredith Band internationally and included a performance at NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series, described by founder Bob Boilen as “the most exhilarating” in the history of the show.
Between 2011 and 2017 he was a central creative collaborator in the freestyle hip hop comedy act Abandoman, co-devising and co-producing shows with Rob Broderick that toured across Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia. The project appeared as the house band on numerous British television programmes and supported Ed Sheeran on a major UK tour.