ALBUMS

Compilation Album | MATHOMS | 2023

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.

Audiovisual Album | DECAYING SPHERES | 2022

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.

Electronic | SELF-RELEASED | 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.

INSTALLATIONS

Quadraphonic Installation | DEEP BLUE STUDIOS | 2019

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.

Performance Installation | LEFT OF MAIN | 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.

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 | 2022

SELECTED COMMISSIONS

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

Sound Design | JOSH MARTIN | 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.

Selected Commissions for Theatre, Dance, and Film

2025

  • Contra, with Eric Cheung & Cristian Gonzalez, The Dance Centre, Vancouver, November 2025 (dance performance, full-length score)

  • ARRAY, with Eric Cheung & Cristian Gonzalez, VIVO Media Arts, Vancouver, June 19-29, 2025 (performance installation, motion-reactive sound)

  • Sloth Canon, with Company 605 & The Human Expression (dance performance, full-length score)

    • premiere at The Dance Centre, Vancouver, June 5-7, 2025

    • cont.act Contemporary Dance Festival, Singapore, June 2025

    • Helatari Salihara Dance Festival, Jakarta, June 2025

  • Becoming, with Luciana Freire D'Anunciação, Roundhouse, Vancouver, June 4, 2025 (installation, four-channel video/audio)

  • Things I Know to Be True, with Théâtre la Seizième, Studio 16, Vancouver, April 30 - May 10, 2025 (theatre performance, full-length score)

2024

  • Nuits Claires: Double Vie, with Anais West, Studio 16, Vancouver, September 21, 2024 (theatre performance, original score)

  • lossy, with Company 605 (dance performance, full-length score)

    • premiere at Milton Wong Experimental Theatre, SFU Woodward’s, Vancouver, June 12-14, 2024

    • Dancing on the Edge, Vancouver, 2024

    • Hold On Let Go, Vancouver, 2024

2023

  • I(n)finite, with Eric Cheung & Alimzhan Sabir (short dance film, original score)

    • Cyrus International Film Festival, 2023 (Best Experimental Short)

    • PushOFF, 2023

    • F-O-R-M (Festival of Recorded Movement), 2023

    • Bronzelens Festival, 2023

    • Toronto Independent Film Festival CIFT, 2023 (Best Experimental Film)

    • València Indie Film Festival (VALÈIFF), 2023

    • Asiate En Court Avec Le Festival Accès Asie, 2023

    • Nowness Asia Online Premiere / Interview, 2023

2022

  • Future Futures, with Company 605, CBC Gem, 2022 (episodic film score, 50 minutes)

    • Dance on Camera Festival, Lincoln Center, New York

    • Dance Camera West, Los Angeles

    • The Third Coast Dance Film Festival, Reno

    • San Francisco Dance Film Festival

    • Portland Dance Film Festival

    • Zêzere Cinedança, Portugal

  • Darkroom, dir. Lukas Maier, 2021 (feature film score)

    • Buddha Pāda Center, Kalimpong, India, 2025

    • Prishtina International Film Festival, 2022

    • Sarajevo Film Festival, 2022

    • Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival, 2022

    • Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Montréal, 2021

    • Vancouver International Film Festival, 2021

  • Brimming, with Company 605, Vancouver International Dance Festival, 2021 (dance performance, music & sound design)

    • TANZAHOi International Dance Festival, 2022

    • Craft Choreography (online from Vienna), 2020

    • National Arts Centre, Ottawa, 2020

    • Dancing on the Edge, Vancouver, 2020

    • Vancouver International Dance Festival, 2020

  • Looping, with Company 605, Dance in Vancouver, Scotiabank Dance Centre, 2019 (live sound performance with dance installation)

    • Internationale Tanzmesse, Düsseldorf, 2022

  • Against, with Kinesis Dance somatheatro, Dance in Vancouver, 2019 (sound design)

  • Loop, Lull, with Company 605, 2019 (full-length dance score)

    • Vancouver International Dance Showcase

    • Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, Burnaby

    • PuSh Festival, Vancouver

    • Discover Dance!, Vancouver

    • Dancing on the Edge, Vancouver, 2018

  • Party Bizarre, with Elissa Hanson & Lexi Vajda, Shooting Gallery Performance, Dusty Flower Shop, Vancouver, 2018 (sound design for dance)

  • In Search of, with Jessica Wilkie & Laura Avery, Shooting Gallery Performance, Dusty Flower Shop, Vancouver, 2018 (sound design)

  • Against (Entrap), with Kinesis Dance somatheatro, Dancing on the Edge, 2018 (sound design)

  • Truck Solo: Part Four, with Lexi Vajda, Left of Main, Vancouver, 2017 (sound design)

  • I Think You Might Be Spilling, with Jessica Wilkie & Laura Avery, New Works Festival, Vancouver, 2017 (sound design)

  • Fordlandia, with Lexi Vajda, Toronto Dance Community Love-In, Toronto, 2017 (sound design)

Selected Installations

  • Reverse Search, Sonorities Festival, Belfast, 2024 (video installation)

    • Video Sound Archive, 2023

    • Deep Blue, Vancouver, 2020

  • ZEITGEBER, with Elissa Hanson, Lobe Studio, Vancouver, 2022 (35-channel sound installation)

  • The Woe Trumpets, with Josh Hite & Bynh Ho, Sound Scene Festival, Washington, DC, 2021 (online audiovisual installation)

    • Chapeltown Picture House, Manchester, 2021

  • Tidal Figures, with Magazinist, Richmond Maritime Festival, 2020 (digital sound installation)

  • Wave Tables, with Magazinist, Vines Art Festival, Vancouver, 2020 (audio walk)

  • Hotel Fata Morgana, with Magazinist, Left of Main, Vancouver, 2019 (performance installation)

  • Vines Collaborative Soundscape Project, Vines Art Festival, Vancouver, 2019 (field recording installation)

  • Big Clear Plastic Ear, Vines Art Festival, Vancouver, 2018 (sound installation)

  • Skytrain Zoo, Vines Art Festival, Vancouver, 2017 (sound installation)

Selected Performances

  • Exterminating Angel, with Magazinist, VIFF Centre, Vancouver, 2025 (live score)

  • Anders als die Andern, with Magazinist, Vancouver Public Library, 2025 (live score)

  • Magazinist Live at VPL, Vancouver Public Library, 2025 (site-specific performance in atrium)

  • Vampyr, with Magazinist, VIFF Centre, Vancouver, 2024 (live film score)

  • Live electronics, as Mathoms, Casse-Tete: A Festival of Experimental Music, 2025 (performance)

  • Magazinist’s Faust, with Magazinist, VIFF Centre, Vancouver, 2024 (live film score)

  • Passing Through (Meeting Points), with Carolina Bergonzoni & Luciana F. D’Anunciação, Roundhouse, Vancouver, 2024 (live score for contemporary dance)

  • Metropolis Reworked, with Magazinist, VIFF Centre, Vancouver, 2023 (live film score)

  • The View From Inside #9, with All Bodies Dance Project, 2020 (live improvised sound)

  • The NELKEN-Line, with Kinesis Dance Somatheatro, 2019 (performance of Pina Bausch choreography)

  • Looping, with Company 605, Vancouver, 2019 (dance installation with live sound)

Discography

  • Original Negative, as Magazinist, Decaying Spheres, 2026 (forthcoming)

  • Pulsatilla, as Magazinist, Discreet Archives, 2025 (forthcoming)

  • Selected Works 2016–2023, as Mathoms, self-released, 2023

  • The Woe Trumpets, as Mathoms, Decaying Spheres, 2022 (supported by the Canada Council for the Arts)

Miscellaneous

  • Chapter 21, sound editing, dir. Sophia Wolfe, 2024 (documentary short)

  • Sun and the Moon, sound editing, dir. Evann Siebens, 2024 (feature documentary)

  • [wings flapping], 2022 (video essay, featured in Sight and Sound “Best Video Essays of 2022”)

Professional Training

  • VIFF Amp: Music in Film Summit, Vancouver International Film Festival, 2023

  • New Aesthetics Performance Intensive, Theatre Replacement, with Malik Gaines & Jeanine Durning, 2019

  • Intro to Contemporary Dance, six-month training with Emmalena Fredriksson, Scotiabank Dance Centre, 2018

Residencies

  • Scotiabank Dance Centre, with Company 605, May 2025

  • VIVO Media Arts, with Eric Cheung, March 2025

  • Lobe Studio, with Elissa Hanson, October 4–13, 2022

  • Banff Centre, with Company 605, March 15–30, 2020 (postponed)

  • Lake Studios Berlin, with Ace Co Pro, March 1–14, 2020

  • Boombox, self-directed, Vancouver, 2018

PAST PROJECTS