Disaster audio, string quintets, and the long process of subtracting meaning from music

Transmission 351: Interview with Those Who Walk Away

Matthew Patton is a composer, curator, and actor based in Winnipeg. He studied composition at the Manhattan School of Music under James Tenney, John Corigliano, and Frederic Rzewski. His first significant work, Speaking in Tongues (1988), a collaboration with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, won an Emmy in 1992 for its PBS broadcast and has been staged at the Paris Opera House, La Scala, the Kennedy Center, and Lincoln Center. Throughout the 2010s, he served as composer and curator of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra New Music Festival, commissioning work by Philip Glass, Glenn Branca, Jonny Greenwood, Tim Hecker, William Basinski, and Jóhann Jóhannsson, among others.

Title: Afterlife Requiem
Artist: Those Who Walk Away
Release Date: 2026-03-06
Genres: Drone, Electronica, Experimental Music
Label: Constellation
Description: Matthew Patton on Afterlife Requiem, Jóhann Jóhannsson's abandoned recordings, and composing from erasure. Constellation Records, 2026.

Under the name Those Who Walk Away, Patton makes durational works built from erasure: strings recorded and degraded past recognition, field recordings from disaster archives, silences lifted from a dead composer’s abandoned hard drives. The project’s first album, The Infected Mass, was staged in complete darkness in 2016 at Winnipeg’s Pan-Am Pool before its Constellation Records release in 2017. Afterlife Requiem, released on Constellation Records in 2026, incorporates fragments recovered from Jóhannsson’s hard drives after his death, performed by two string quintets in Reykjavík and Winnipeg, both with direct personal connections to Jóhannsson.

What were some of your earliest influences, and what was the moment that you realized that music is something you really wanted to pursue?

There was never any “moment”. I always worked at music from the time I was a child… my whole life. I always practiced just about every day growing up. It was my life. I hardly even thought about it. It was something I always did and obviously enjoyed.

I grew up in a very musical family where every family member played an instrument, practiced, and was accomplished. We all studied with members of the symphony orchestra and we all played in orchestras through high school. Music was everywhere all the time in my life. And by that I mean everything from Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Stockhausen, Neil Young, and Talk Talk, to Brahms, Samuel Barber, Charles Ives, Steve Reich, and Jacques Brel.

My earliest influences were my music teachers. They were amazing as human beings and each changed my life for the better. I am, and always have been an outsider, even as a child because I was obsessed with and involved in music, which is a solitary activity – practicing for hours – so I was drawn to a certain kind of teacher, themselves outsiders. And somehow luckily I found them or they found me. I think I needed the teachers even more than the music. The best and most profound music lessons I ever had were the ones where not one note of music was ever played. I still believe in that approach.

At the same time, I should be clear that while I loved music, I hated the ecosystem that “classical” music or “new music” existed in. I still do.

How did Those Who Walk Away begin?

I wanted to form a different identity. I wanted to not be Matthew Patton. I am obsessed with author Patricia Highsmith, every book of hers is about people who take on false identities. Those Who Walk Away itself is the title of my favorite book by Highsmith.

Those Who Walk Away started in 2017 with The Infected Mass. What led you to build a project around such difficult personal material?

For me, the material in “The Infected Mass” is not “difficult”, its simply what my life is, and what I experience in life. In simple terms I was just expressing what came out when I was writing. The cockpit voice recordings had an urgency I was drawn to. Also I was conflicted, it felt wrong to use them. I am very drawn to this kind of problematic creative situation in every project. Feeling uncomfortable is where I feel most comfortable, where it feels right. There needs to be something wrong for art to be meaningful.

How did working with files from Jóhann Jóhannsson’s hard drives change your understanding of what the album needed to be?

I didn’t think of the process in that way. There was no pre-defined “understanding” of what anything needed to be. Jóhann Jóhannsson‘s abandoned music or more specifically how his state of mind seemed to be slowly changing, told me just about everything that needed to be done. I just listened obsessively for months trying to understand the various real world manifestations of this through his actual music left behind, the abandoned remains of music, and undertook to be true to it and to him as a friend.

What draws you to erasure and submersion of source material as compositional tools?

I am obsessed with ruins and degradation in all things. To me, these things are more beautiful than anything actually beautiful. Because they are disappearing before our eyes into the past. And the minute something is in the past, it is already far more interesting than the present or the future could ever be. If I could write music that already existed in the past, I would. As author Robert Walser said, “former beauty is even more beautiful than actual beauty”. These things have a built in past, a built in history. They are already damaged. This kind of aesthetic exists more in film with directors like Bill Morrison. Or in painting with Gerhard Richter, who did the cover for “Afterlife Requiem”. I worked for a long time trying to see how genuine and beautiful degradation, decay, and blurring of materials might work alongside collapsing structures in music. It was very labor intensive over years. “The Infected Mass” was the first piece that “worked”.

How did the black box recordings end up in The Infected Mass?

Every piece of music I have ever done contains audio from the real world. For me, it connects the music to something actual. And the audio is another line of music to me.

I collect thousands and thousands of recordings of real life audio. I have always been drawn to black box recordings because while they sound so banal, the events themselves are absolutely catastrophic. I love any kind of audio of people under stress. Its not what is said but how it is said. For example, for very specific reasons related to Johann, in “Afterlife Requiem” I use audio of the space shuttle burning up as it re-enters the atmosphere and we hear the very last communications of the crew, who have no idea what is happening. Their lives will end in 28 seconds. And nobody knows it.

How did the two string quintets, from Winnipeg and Reykjavik, work differently with the material?

In some ways, the two string quintets didn’t work all that differently while in the recording studio. Being in the studio with classical musicians is usually fairly straight forward because they are highly trained and the clock is always running. However, in Iceland, we worked on a lot more experimentation. Also the musicians in Iceland, the Ghost Orchestra, all worked closely with Johann so it was emotionally different and it meant a lot to all of us. The musicians in Winnipeg, the Possible Orchestra, worked with Johann too but only for a short period on the huge 45 minute symphony that I commissioned from Johann that we worked on with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and which Deutsche Grammophon recorded a few years ago with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra at Harpa. But to answer your question, we did a lot more musical experimentation in Iceland as the musicians very much wanted to try different things.

How much does living in Winnipeg feed into the project?

Maybe not much, maybe a lot. I don’t know. I travel a lot. There is a great studio engineer that I work with in Winnipeg by the name of Andy Rudolph. Plus a group of outsider artist friends including film director Guy Maddin, his editor John Gurdebeke, the Royal Art Lodge guys, John K. Samson of the Weakerthans, artist Sarah Anne Johnson, film director Matthew Rankin, and others. All good artists in Winnipeg are outsiders. We sometimes work on each other’s projects. The Royal Art Lodge guys, Neil Farber and Michael Dumontier, did the cover for “The Infected Mass”.

What was it like hearing Alessandro Cortini work with your source material?

As you might imagine, its always interesting working with artists you admire and seeing how they rework your original music. My instructions were always the same – to work to extremes, and to destroy the music beautifully. And each of Alessandro Cortini, Paul Corley, and Ian William Craig did just that… in completely different ways. Other artists did as well, some of which may be coming in the future.

Is there a next project taking shape?

My next project is already completed. I worked with the great Abul Mogard whose music I absolutely love, plus other musicians. The work after that is also done, it will be for negative string orchestra – a string orchestra with a predominance of low end basses and cellos, less violas, and even less violins. After recording, I erase and degrade most of the string orchestra in the studio until its damaged to the verge of structural collapse. It will be different, more monolithic, more pathological.

Finally, I want to mention how amazing Ian Ilavsky and Don Wilkie are at Constellation. You may be interviewing me as an artist but people like Ian and Don provide artists with a highly stimulating and highly principled environment to work within. They ask questions, they gently prod, they are opinionated – but they are also kind and generous, all in the best way imaginable. As a record label, they actually stand for something which has meant a lot to me. And to many others.

Photo courtesy of Those Who Walk Away

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others