THOSE WHO WALK AWAY
THE INFECTED MASS (CONSTELLATION)
180gram vinyl includes 12x24 art print poster + download card. 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, Jóhann Jóhannsson).
RIYL: William Basinski, John Adams, Oneohtrix Point Never, Arvo Pärt, The Haxan Cloak, Morton Feldman, Mark Rothko, The Brothers Quay.
Winnipeg-based composer Matthew Patton is best known for his widely acclaimed musical score (and Emmy Award-winning collaboration) Speaking In Tongues with the choreographer Paul Taylor.
The Infected Mass is a haunted and profoundly emotive requiem of minimalist composition that combines ghostly strings and choral voices with musique concrA"te; 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.
Patton explains: "There is something very genuine and at the same time very wrong in what I am doing.
But this work is disturbingly personal for me. The music is filled with ghosts and artifacts I couldn't erase, a pathology which infects everything, of decayed memories haunted by the ghost of my brother, who was killed in a plane crash." The Infected Mass is a powerful work of avant-garde sacral music, executed with elegiac beauty and restraint.
Co-produced by Paul Corley (Ben Frost, Oneohtrix Point Never).