Thursday 19 November 2015, 8pm
Veterans of the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, High Zero Festival in Baltimore and Vicki Bennett’s Notations tour, free improvisers M.C. Schmidt (Matmos) and Jennifer Walshe (Aisteach) make their London debut as a duo. Previous performances have featured amplified snow, extended vocal techniques, Chinese comedy records etc.
M.C. Schmidt is best known as one half of Californian (now relocated to Baltimore) duo Matmos, renowned for marrying a love of electronic pop with musique concrete tactics and a penchant for unusual sound sources (liposuction surgery, amplified crayfish nerve tissue, latex fetish clothing, contact mics on human hair…). In 2001 they were invited to work with Bjork on her Vespertine album, leading to two world tours as part of her band, and have also collaborated with Zeena Parkins, Antony, David Tibet, Marina Abramovic and many others.
“The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years” (The Irish Times) and “Wild girl of Darmstadt” (Frankfurter Rundschau), composer and performer Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast and performed all over the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others. Many of Walshe’s recent projects focus on the planet Mars, using it as a lens to think through the most pressing issues of our time. Notable projects from this series include MARS I, for Klangforum Wien and Some Notes on Martian Sonic Aesthetics 2034-51 for Ensemble Modern, culminating in MARS (2025) for Irish National Opera. Another recent project is the music-theatre work The Alonetimes, written with Philip Venables, which premiered at the Fondation Cartier in Paris in April 2026. Walshe has worked with AI for over a decade, and her book 13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art & Music was published by Unsound in 2024. A Spanish translation was published by Alpha Decay (Barcelona) in 2025. Recent albums include In the Merry Month of May (Blue Chopsticks, 2024), Walshe’s duo album with Tony Conrad, which was chosen as an album of the year by The Wire, The Vinyl Factory and KLOF Magazine. Walshe’s double album An Gléacht/Dordán (Diatribe, 2024) received the Académie Charles Cros Coup de Cœur for Experimental Music. Walshe is Professor of Composition at the University of Oxford. Her work has been profiled in many publications including The New Yorker.
