those who walk away - the infected mass - lp

Those Who Walk Away is the new project of Winnipeg-based composer Matthew Patton, 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 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.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).