ALBUMS
The Woe Trumpets is an audiovisual album that reimagines dystopian narratives by attempting to find hidden subtexts within the grand metaphor of apocalypse. Combining music by Mathoms (Matthew Tomkinson) with found footage compiled by Josh Hite, along with design by Bynh Ho and artwork by Krystyna Curtis, The Woe Trumpets revisits films from the golden age of disaster cinema, finding new meanings in these blockbusters’ quieter moments and micro-expressions.
Watch the film here.
Audiovisual Album | DECAYING SPHERES | 2022
An ode to the simple and omnipresent beauty of the arpeggio as a musical structure, Arpeggio of Our Years is a collection of ambient sketches that celebrate the literal ups and downs of notation as well as life's figurative ones of time, emotion, sensation, and circumstance. 100% of proceeds from the album are donated to local charities, including the BC Mental Health Foundation, and the BC Crisis Centre.
Electronic | SELF-RELEASED | 2022
SELECTED
SOUND DESIGN
Future Futures, by Company 605 and director Brian J. Johnson, taps into the science fiction genre to explore a digital evolution of the future human through a series of 5 short experimental dance films that investigate the perceived borders of humanity and envision how we might move beyond. Future Futures is a CBC Arts Original.
Episodic Film Score | COMPANY 605 + CBC | 2022
In After We Glow, Vancouver’s Company 605 asks how we envision future in our bodies and how we might move there. Time and place are constantly bent and distorted, and dancers move between unfamiliar forms and rhythms, playing within unknowable spaces. Sparking new possibilities for connection, their two separate trajectories align, intersect, merge, and split, eventually weaving together to illuminate a new way forward.
Dance Score | BALLET BC + COMPANY 605 | 2021
Created and performed by Josh Martin, Brimming is a new solo investigating the body as a container: a rigid frame holding in and concealing its stored inner contents. The piece imagines the body as a hollow interior space continuously shaped and reshaped, filled and emptied, and inhabited through different states. Brimming explores this shape we are in, how it holds us, and what might eventually spill out when the walls begin to bend.
Sound Design | JOSH MARTIN | 2021
INSTALLATIONS
Reverse Search is a four-channel audio installation with video projection, by Magazinist (Matthew Tomkinson & Andy Zuliani). The work explores the coping mechanisms and interpretive schemas that one uses to deal with media saturation – binge-listening, purge-watching, endless scrolling – and the tendency of these modes of engagement toward superstition, paranoia, and conspiracy. Drawing on thousands of discrete sounds and images, Reverse Search attempts to shape an overwhelming surplus of data into a coherent composition.
Quadraphonic Installation | DEEP BLUE STUDIOS | 2019
Hotel Fata Morgana is a found video collage with live synthesizers, samplers, and tape, by Magazinist (Matthew Tomkinson & Andy Zuliani). The piece explores the notion of music-as-mirage, using weird and wobbly textures, spectral shimmers, microtonal melodies, and slow-oscillating drones to approximate, musically, the optics of refraction. A four-part video series mirrors these transformations by reworking found YouTube footage — obscure documentaries, amateur meteorology, and news coverage — into new, hallucinatory geometries and nested surfaces. A study in distorted sonic realities, Hotel Fata Morgana interrogates the seductiveness of false horizons and fairy-tale architectures.
Performance Installation | LEFT OF MAIN | 2019
RESIDENCIES
Zeitgeber is a research project that explores the phenomenon of entrainment. In this research, Matthew Tomkinson and Elissa Hanson focus on the way that external rhythmic time-cues, including social interaction, can affect one's biological rhythms. This research and performance is imagined as both a metaphor for, and a material example of, emotional self-regulation and co-regulation. Some key areas of interest during this residency include entrainment, co-regulation, biological rhythms, participatory performance, and experimental electronic music.
Artist in Residence | LOBE STUDIO | 2019
2023 Lossy | Dance score for live performance | COMPANY 605 | Dancing on the Edge
2022 I(n)finite | Dance score for short film | ERIC CHEUNG & ALIMZHAN SABIR
2022 Future Futures | 50-minute episodic film score | COMPANY 605 | CBC Digital Web Series
2021 After We Glow (Unfold + Give) | Dance score for Ballet BC | COMPANY 605 | Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Vancouver, BC
2021 Darkroom | Music for film | dir. LUKAS MAIER | Vancouver International Film Festival, Vancouver, BC
“ ” Prishtina International Film Festival (2022)
“ ” Sarajevo Film Festival (2022)
“ ” Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival (2022)
“ ” Festival du Nouveau Cinema de Montreal (2021)
2021 The Woe Trumpets | Audiovisual album and installation with Josh Hite | MATHOMS | Sound SceneFestival, Washington, DC
“ ” Chapeltown Picture House, Manchester (2021)
2021 Chirp | A remix of crickets in Sicily | CITIES & MEMORY: A GLOBAL COLLABORATIVE SOUND PROJECT
2021 Brimming, music and sound design, with Company 605, Vancouver International Dance Festival
“ ” TANZAHOi International Dance Festival (2022)
“ ” Vancouver International Dance Festival (2021)
“ ” Craft Choreography, online from Vienna (2020)
“ ” National Arts Centre, Ottawa (2020)
“ ” Vancouver International Dance Festival (2020)
“ ” Dancing on the Edge, Vancouver (2020)
2020 The View From Inside #9 | Live improvised sound with the ALL BODIES DANCE PROJECT, via Zoom
2020 Tidal Figures | Digital sound installation | MAGAZINIST | Richmond Maritime Festival, BC
2020 Wave Tables | Audio walk | MAGAZINIST | Vines Art Festival, Vancouver, BC
2020 Reverse Search | Audiovisual installation | MAGAZINIST | Deep Blue, Vancouver, BC
2019 Looping | Live sound performance for dance installation | COMPANY 605 | Dance in Vancouver, Scotiabank Dance Centre
“ ” Internationale Tanzmesse, Düsseldorf (2022)
2019 Against | Dance score | KINESIS DANCE SOMATHEATRO | Dance in Vancouver, Scotiabank Dance Centre
2019 Hotel Fata Morgana | Performance Installation | MAGAZINIST | Left of Main, Vancouver, BC
2019 Vines Collaborative Soundscape Project | Field recording installation | Vines Art Festival, Vancouver, BC
2019 The NELKEN-Line | Dancer with KINESIS DANCE SOMATHEATRO (performing Pina Bausch) | Vancouver, BC
2019 Loop, Lull | Full-length dance score | COMPANY 605 | Vancouver’s International Dance Showcase
“ ” Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, Burnaby (2019)
“ ” PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, Scotiabank Dance Centre, Vancouver (2019)
“ ” Discover Dance!, Vancouver (2018)
“ ” Dancing on the Edge Festival, Vancouver (2018)
2018 Party Bizarre | Dance score | ACE CO PRO | Shooting Gallery Performance, Dusty Flower Shop, Vancouver, BC
2018 In Search of | Dance score | JESSICA WILKIE & LAURA AVERY | Shooting Gallery Performance, Dusty Flower Shop, Vancouver, BC
2018 Against (Entrap) | Dance score | KINESIS DANCE SOMATHEATRO | Dancing on the Edge, Brooks Corning, Vancouver, BC
2018 Big Clear Plastic Ear | Sound installation | Vines Art Festival, Vancouver, BC
2017 Truck Solo: Part Four | Dance score | LEXI VAJDA | Left of Main, Vancouver, BC
2017 I think you might be spilling | Dance score | JESSICA WILKIE & LAURA AVERY | New Forms Festival, Vancouver, BC (2017)
2017 Fordlandia | Dance score | LEXI VAJDA | Toronto Dance Community Love-In, Toronto, ON
2017 Skytrain Zoo | Sound installation | Vines Art Festival, Vancouver, BC
PAST PROJECTS
A collection of 40 sketches and scores for film, theatre, and contemporary dance, from 2016-2023.
All music composed, performed, recorded, and mixed by Matthew Tomkinson.
Compilation Album | MATHOMS | 2023