Afterlife Requiem [CD]

Those Who Walk Away - Afterlife Requiem [CD]

Post-classical composer, sound artist, and curator Matthew Patton returns with his second album as Those Who Walk Away. Afterlife Requiem is an elegy to friend and collaborator Jóhann Jóhannsson. Drone, electroacoustics, and near-silences extracted from unfinished recordings on Jóhannsson hard drives, underpin two string quintets-Ghost Orchestra (Reykjavík) and Possible Orchestra (Winnipeg)-processed and erased in a doleful durational work. Patton also works again with Andy Rudolph (Guy Maddin) and Paul Corley (Sigur Rós, Ben Frost) on co-production and sound design, to forge a simmering physicality that juxtaposes roiling low-end with haunting movements of ghostly strings. Everything I have ever written is a Requiem. Everything an ending. Death is smeared all over this music. My work is about disappearance-of the present, the past, of everything. Afterlife Requiem gets slower and slower over it's duration, it is one huge ritardando, time is not just slowing down-it is disappearing. Without even thinking, two related tragedies occurred and came to the surface organically while I was writing, recording, and working: the death of my mother and the death of composer and friend Jóhann Jóhannsson. When I start writing, I am not thinking of anything in particular, I am just writing, composing, recording, and listening... but something always makes itself apparent or pushes itself through in an unforeseen way. After my mother's medically-assisted death, in clearing out her apartment, I realized that I was also erasing the physical manifestation of her world-and that I was doing the exact same thing with the music I was writing and recording. During this time, Jóhann's death also kept making itself apparent. For Afterlife Requiem I have taken short abandoned fragments from Jóhann Jóhannsson's hard drives and placed these disembodied audio ghosts in alternating sections within my own music, leaving them impure-and in the process blurring the distinction between making and un-making. After his death, I had been given these hard drives from Jóhannsson's Berlin studio to listen to. This music was abandoned, in various states of formation and dissolution: an index of decayed and dead memories, forgotten and now existing only within a series of interlocking mechanical parts which in time will themselves fail and disappear, like everything else. For months, I listened to these remains of Jóhann's music obsessively, trying to discover clues about Jóhann before he died. Many times I would find that he had left the recording device going long after the recorded music was over. He seemed to be unaware that the music had ceased or didn't register this was the end of the music or maybe he was distracted by something else. But I found these long silences profoundly emotional and touching.