Nicole Bettencourt Coelho
Nicole Bettencourt Coelho is a Musician and Art Director based in London. Originally coming from a background of the DIY alternative scene in South Africa, she cut her musical teeth session playing in Nashville, TN as well as relentlessly touring and performing original music around the USA. She occasionally sessions for other artists but always has one creative musical project as her main focus. Currently she plays bass, writes songs and experiments with sound in Vuvuvultures.
Vuvuvultures released their debut EP last year, and will be releasing their first full length album in 2013. Her most recent session gig was performing and recording with “Delooze”, a project featuring members from Florence & The Machine, Gnarls Barkley, Alanis Morissette, and a mini symphonic orchestra.
In 2011 she founded “The Island” with her bandmates and team of artists, technicians and general creative misfits who create once off surreal themed parties in disused space or venues with unique character in London. This process includes building a stylised environment made of mostly found resources and building and designing interactive audio-visual experiments which generally end up destroyed by the end of the night.
In addition to bass guitar she also plays piano, guitar, ukulele, synths and anything that will make some kind of interesting sound. Especially odd little toys or machines.
Nicole is particularly interested in the process of combining live energy of musicians writing and playing songs together with more unpredictable electronic, experimental sounds.
She is endorsed by GHS Strings and Ashdown Amplifiers.
Ditch backing tracks, make machine
Vuvuvultures’ music is very much a combination of experimenting with sound in the studio, and the live energy of writing and performing an actual song. As a result we always found playing live to be a bit of a challenge as in order to incorporate the sounds we had made in the studio we tended to have to use a backing track.