Charlie Clouser


Charles Alexander Clouser is an American keyboardist, composer, record producer, and remixer. He worked with Trent Reznor for Nine Inch Nails from 1994–2000, and is a composer for film and television; among his credits are the score for the Saw franchise and American Horror Story. Clouser was nominated for two Grammy Awards for Best Metal Performance in 1997.

Life and career

Clouser plays keyboard, synthesizer, theremin, and drums. He also does music programming, engineering, and mixing. He co-worked with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails for several projects. Before he worked with Nine Inch Nails, he was in the alternative band Burning Retna with former L.A. Guns guitarist Mick Cripps and fellow Nothing Records employee Sean Beavan. Clouser also was a member of the band 9 Ways to Sunday, which released a self-titled album in 1990. Clouser has remixed artists such as Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, White Zombie, Rammstein and Meat Beat Manifesto.
In 2004, Clouser produced the Helmet album Size Matters. Consisting mainly of collaborations between Clouser and Page Hamilton, it was intended to be a Hamilton solo album. The first release from the collaboration, known as Throwing Punches, appeared on a soundtrack in 2003 for the film Underworld, and was credited as a Hamilton track. Clouser created one of FirstCom music's master series discs, only sold for commercial use, in the late 1990s.
Two songs programmed by Clouser were nominated for Grammy Awards in 1997: White Zombie's "I'm Your Boogie Man" and Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper's "Hands of Death," the latter of which Clouser also co-wrote and mixed.
He worked with Trent Reznor on the soundtrack of Natural Born Killers, helping record and produce a new version of "Something I Can Never Have," the original version of which appeared on Nine Inch Nails Pretty Hate Machine album. Clouser's remix of Zombie's "Dragula" can be found on The Matrix. Another Zombie track remixed by Clouser, "Reload", appears on The Matrix Reloaded. He produced the unfinished Hamilton project Gandhi.
Clouser provided the live synth for Alec Empire's "Intelligence And Sacrifice" tour in 2001. He appears in the Moog documentary about electronic-music pioneer Robert Moog and composed the song "I Am a Spaceman" for the original soundtrack of that movie.
Clouser has also worked as a film and television composer, scoring the entire Saw series of films, as well as Deepwater, Dead Silence, Death Sentence, and . On television, he was the composer for the TV series Las Vegas, Fastlane, and Numbers. Additionally, he composed the theme song for those shows as well as American Horror Story.

Personal life

Charlie was born in Hanover, New Hampshire. He married his long-time girlfriend, photographer and model Zoe Wiseman in the summer of 2007. He is a graduate of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Discography

With Nine Inch Nails
Marilyn Manson
White Zombie
Rob Zombie
Clouser has performed on releases with a variety of other artists and bands.

Film

Television

Video games