Those Who Walk Away

The new project by contemporary music composer Matthew Patton co-produced by Paul Corley (Ben Frost, Oneohtrix Point Never) and featuring Icelandic Symphonic Orchestra string players (Sigur Rós). Those Who Walk Away - “an ever evolving working group of melodic constructivists” - Matthew Patton. Patton is perhaps best known for his highy acclaimed (and Emmy Award-winning collaboration) Speaking In Tongues with the choreographer Paul Taylor, and has worked with Mikhail Baryshnikov, Guy Maddin and many others. He is also the curator of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra New Music Festival. The Infected Mass is the first of several works Patton intends to release as Those Who Walk Away. The Infected Mass 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 explains: “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. The Infected Mass is a powerful work of contemporary sacral music, executed with elegiac beauty and restraint. Recorded in Winnipeg and Reykjavik, a quintet of Winnipeg-based string players combines with a quartet of Icelandic Symphony Orchestra players performing ‘ghost strings’ and ’ghost choir’ for this Mass. Patton, as composer, arranger and producer, then obsessively sculpts these recordings with erasure techniques, seeking liminal and transcendent horizons of sonic materiality through absence, subtraction, silence and collapsing structure.

180gram vinyl includes 12x24 art print poster + DL.