“The relationship between acoustic instruments and technology is historically awkward - everything is compromise or imitation. I want to turn that upside down. Instead of reproduction or expansion of a notional acoustic ideal, I’m interested in what happens when the parts are viewed as equals, and serve each other's potential.”
His score as composer for Giulio Bertelli’s striking debut feature film Agon (2025) will be released in 2026. Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize (International Federation of Film Critics), the film is a triptych of three female athletes preparing for a fictional Olympic games. Straddling fiction and documentary, the score reflects the film’s hyper-focus on the gesture of sports performances, each protagonist mirrored by an instrumentalist: fencing with cellist Ute Kanngiesser; rifle shooting with saxophonist Jean-Luc Guionnet, and judo with percussionist Seijiro Murayama, with his bandmate Grundik Kasyansky on electronics and Harry Gorskí-Brown on bagpipes completing the chamber group.
Prior to Agon he worked on scores with award-winning composer Daniel Blumberg, including the Oscar and BAFTA winning score for Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (2024), as well as director Mona Fastvold’s The World to Come (2020), and The Testament of Ann Lee (2025), for which he played viola da gamba and other early European string instruments.
His active projects as a musician centre around the duo Tennota with Grundik Kasyansky, formed in 2019. Once described as ‘half techno, half free jazz’, the project is about the generative friction between physical and digital arenas. They take primary materials – gut strings, sine waves, tree sap, feedback – and engage them with contemporary technologies, towards a taut and nebulous rhythmic language. They have released albums on Accidental Meetings, Cafe Oto’s TakuRoku, and most recently a collaboration with artist and musician Rosa Anschútz on Meakusma.
Other projects include an ongoing collaboration with Italian fashion project GR10K. Among their collaborations was Stringent Manners, a performance at Auditorium San Fedele for the launch of GR10K SS25: Nine Pounds of Dead Landscape. Wheatley worked on musical direction, performance, and co-composition with Andrea Slaviero, choreographing students from the Milan Conservatory as both models and instrumentalists for this ambitious six hour piece, which harnessed the students boredom and frustration to shape the performance. He has also worked with fashion designer Charles Jeffrey’s Loverboy label, and in Cast-On with Ilana Blumberg, a duo that collaborated with a revolving cast of practitioners across music, fashion, set design, photography and theatre to build critical environments. Their last project was Dresser Music, a film for Cafe Oto. Set at the margins of a photoshoot for Blumberg’s 2021 knitwear collection, it investigates both the unseen layers of performance that make a photograph, and the unheard undercarriage of background music, a piano rambling through incomplete references.
He also works with Sarah Hartnett (Ghostlore of Britain), as Vesta Payne. They released mlybdmncy on Doyenne Books in 2023, a project that manifested as an EP and a limited run of metal objects. Molten pewter was cast directly into water, and the process was meticulously recorded. The sounds were then gathered and “recast” into the accompanying EP.
Growing up in a multi-generational family of musicians, he is a seasoned instrumentalist. Over the years, he has collaborated and performed with stalwarts and luminaries of contemporary music, including Eddie Prévost, Billy Steiger, Ute Kanngiesser, Adam Christensen, Jim White, Okkyung Lee, Evan Parker, Ilan Volkov, Steve Noble, Sachiko M, and John Edwards, with releases on OtoRoku, Matchless and Earshots.