Matthew Grouse
I’m a composer, originally from Yorkshire (UK), currently living in Copenhagen and studying in Aarhus (DK). I often work at an intersection be- tween music for instruments and voices; electron- ic sound; text; video; and performance. Recently, my work has engaged with a re-contextualisation of everyday sounds, objects, spaces and automatic social and physical behaviours.
My pieces have involved, amongst other things, documentary techniques; self-reflexivity; repetition; quotidian speech and small-talk; custom-built, tactile electronic instruments like paintbrush synthesizers; staring contests; quotation and disfigurement of pre-existing music; instrumentalised light and scenography; YouTube comments sung by choral singers and a virtual singer soloist; and spatialised orchestral music performed on top of mountains, in train stations, in swimming pools, and in remote communities in the Scottish Highlands.
I am a member of the Aarhus-based compos- er-performer group Current Resonance, regularly contributing to meticulously curated intermedial events.
CTRL+Y
ctrl+Y follows my interest in recasting everyday sounds, behaviours and quotidian objects as compositional material. In part, this is a search for something inherently or latently musical in unexpected places, in this case, the focus is a ubiquitous and basic home/office technology (the qwerty keyboard). The work draws on Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of de-familiarisation, twisting common aspects of everyday life, making them strange and uncanny in a search for new perspectives on / altered attention to familiar, even mundane realities.
In ctrl+Y, I was particularly thinking about repetition involved in the everyday activities of the ensemble, and repetition as a vehicle to build cognitive and motoric fluency incrementally. The fluency here pertains to learning and speaking a foreign language, playing their instruments, and typed communication.