Those Who Walk Away

Those Who Walk Away is the project of celebrated Winnipeg-based composer Matthew Patton. A graduate in Music Composition from the Manhattan School of Music, Patton’s mentors have included composers James Tenney and John Corigliano. He has collaborated with such internationally renowned artists as choreographer Paul Taylor, dancer and actor Mikhail Baryshnikov, and most recently with film director Guy Maddin, for whom he wrote and recorded new music for the 2015 Criterion DVD release of My Winnipeg.

Speaking in Tongues, the acclaimed (and Emmy Award-winning) dance piece by Paul Taylor for which Patton scored the music, was called “a masterpiece for our time” by the New York Times, and has been mounted at the Paris Opera House, La Scala in Milan, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and Lincoln Center in New York.

Patton is curator of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra New Music Festival, where he has mounted new work by Jim Jarmusch, Phil Kline, Glenn Branca, Lee Ranaldo , members of Sigur Ros, Valgeir Sigurdsson, Johann Johannsson, the Quay Brothers, Mychael Danna, Venetian Snares, Tim Hecker, Owen Pallett, Lubomyr Melnyk, and many others. He teaches new music at the University of Manitoba and is a guest lecturer on contemporary Icelandic music and culture. Patton also has a small acting part in Ge9n (A9ainst), the recent film from Iceland about the Reykjavik Nine who temporarily overtook the Icelandic parliament.

The Infected Mass, Patton’s debut recording as Those Who Walk Way, is a haunted and profoundly emotive requiem of minimalist composition that combines ghostly strings and choral voices with musique concrète; melodic passages rise and fall amidst rumbling and sibilant drones sourced from humming and whispering voices and the sound of human blood flow, punctuated by cockpit voice recordings of airplanes in distress. Patton obsessively sculpts the recordings with erasure techniques, seeking liminal and transcendent horizons of sonic materiality through absence, subtraction, silence and collapsing structure. Co-produced with Paul Corley (Sigur Ros, Bjork) at The Greenhouse in Reykjavik and Andy Rudolph at Private Ear in Winnipeg, The Infected Mass will be released by Montréal-based label Constellation in March 2017, including a deluxe audiophile vinyl edition with extensive artwork commissioned from Royal Art Lodge of Winnipeg alumni Neil Farber and Michael Dumontier.