At the start of the 1970s, Chris Cutler co-founded The Ottawa Music Company – a 22-piece Rock composer’s orchestra – before joining British experimental group Henry Cow, with whom he toured, recorded and worked in dance and theatre projects for the next eight years. Subsequently he founded or co-founded a series of mixed national groups: Art Bears, News from Babel, Cassiber, The (ec) Nudes, p53, and The Science Group, and was a permanent member of American bands Pere Ubu, Hail and The Wooden Birds, as well as a couple of dozen shorter-lived projects. Outside a succession of special projects for stage, theatre, film and radio he still works in successive projects with Fred Frith, Ikue Mori, Zeena Parkins, Jon Rose, David Thomas, Peter Blegvad, Daevid Allen, The Bad Boys Collective and spectralists Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana Maria Avram. He has toured the world as a soloist with his extended electrified kit and worked in countless contexts as an improviser.
Adjacent projects include commissioned works for radio, various live movie soundtracks, pieces for the Hyperion Ensemble, Signe de Trois for surround-sound projection, a daily year-long soundscape project for Resonance FM, London, and p53 for Orchestra and Soloists. He founded and runs the independent label ReR Megacorp and the art distribution service Gallery and Academic. He edited the Re Records Quarterly and authored the theoretical collection File Under Popular - as well as numerous articles and papers, published in 16 languages. He was on faculty for a while at the Museum School in Boston and lectures irregularly on theoretical and music related topics worldwide.