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 Jhann Jhannsson.
Drone, electroacoustics, and near-silences extracted from unfinished recordings on Jhannsson hard drives, underpin two string quintetsGhost Orchestra (Reykjavk) 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 Rs, 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 disappearanceof the present, the past, of everything.
Afterlife Requiem gets slower and slower over its duration, it is one huge ritardando, time is not just slowing downit 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 Jhann Jhannsson.
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 mothers medically-assisted death, in clearing out her apartment, I realised that I was also erasing the physical manifestation of her worldand that I was doing the exact same thing with the music I was writing and recording.
During this time, Jhanns death also kept making itself apparent.

For Afterlife Requiem I have taken short abandoned fragments from Jhann Jhannsson's hard drives and placed these disembodied audio ghosts in alternating sections within my own music, leaving them impureand in the process blurring the distinction between making and un-making.
After his death, I had been given these hard drives from Jhannsson'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 Jhanns music obsessively, trying to discover clues about Jhann 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.

The disappearing elegies of Afterlife Requiem are not so much music as they are the remains of music.
In this way I always work towards the subtraction of meaning.
The music is distant and smeared, damaged, ghost-like and haunted, only hinting like a half-forgotten memory of what once existed; a condensed depiction of decay and erasure.
I have underlaid the whole of this new piece, from beginning to end, with these disembodied silences from Jhanns own work, space, and time.
Now gone forever, his recorded silence remains; a monumental vacancy lost to the world.
Throughout the piece, and especially in the Memorial Environment sections, I also incorporate countless natural-world sounds, everything from volcanic lava to freight elevators to human blood flow to turbine hiss to suicide injections.

Artist Robert Smithson said decades ago: It is the dimension of absence that remains to be found.
For me, this music also measures how time runs out.
In fact, time already has run out.
Eternity has already begun.

Matthew Patton (Those Who Walk Away)

RIYL: Alessandro Cortini, Sarah Davachi, Tim Hecker, William Basinksi, Lawrence English, GAS