“Silence is my substitute for counterpoint. It’s like thinning out the music with turpentine.”
– Morton Feldman
Winnipeg-based composer Matthew Patton has announced the debut album under his Those Who Walk Away moniker. The album, The Infected Mass, was recorded in collaboration with string ensembles in Winnipeg and the Reykjavík-based Icelandic Symphony Orchestra (who have previously layed down strings for the likes of Sigur Rós and Jóhann Jóhannsson).
Produced with Paul Corley (Ben Frost, Oneohtrix Point Never), The Infected Mass is a minimalist album incorporating voice, strings, and musique concrete and will be released March 17 via Constellation Records. It promises to be a haunting and personal record dealing with the death of Patton’s brother, who died in a plane crash.
There is something very genuine and at the same time very wrong in what I am doing. The recordings are very disturbing; as we listen to these cockpit voice recordings, real people are about to die. I don’t know why I am doing something that feels so wrong. But I am. This work is disturbingly personal for me. The music is filled with ghosts and artifacts I couldn’t erase. It is filled to the saturation point with a pathology which infects everything, of decayed memories haunted by the ghost of my brother, who was killed in a plane crash.
Deep seems like an understatement.
The Infected Mass tracklist:
01. Before the Beginning
02. First Degraded Hymn
03. First Partially Recollected Conversation
04. Second Degraded Hymn
05. Second Partially Recollected Conversation
06. Third Degraded Hymn
07. After the End
More about: Matthew Patton, Those Who Walk Away
