Mathew Adkins: biography

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electroradio

Mathew Adkins (Leamington, England, UK, 1972) • residence: Huddersfield, England, UK

• composer

Mathew Adkins is a composer, performer and lecturer in electroacoustic music. He read music at Pembroke College (Cambridge, UK) and then, in 1993, became a member of the BEAST (Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre). He studied electronic music with Jonty Harrison and then Simon Waters. It was at the age of 22 that he first came to international attention with the electroacoustic works Melt and Clothed in the Soft Horizon. Between them these works were awarded the Stockholm Electronic Arts Award (Sweden), the Résidence Prize (Bourges, France) and the Grand Prix of Musica Nova (Prague, Czech Republic). He has since won more than a dozen international prizes for his work, which has been performed and broadcasted throughout Europe, USA, Canada, Australasia, China, and Asia. He has worked in a number of prestigious European studios, including EMS (Stockholm, Sweden), Ina-GRM and IRCAM (Paris, France), Césare (Reims, France), and Heinrich Strobel Studio (Freiburg, Germany).

In the early 1990s, Adkins concentrated predominantly on acousmatic concert music but has since diversified into composing electronic works for contemporary dance, multimedia works, and electroacoustic music. What he is particularly drawn to in writing such works is the collaborative process that evolves between the composer and artist/performers. The most notable of these have been Neurotransmission (1998), an hour-long acousmatic dance score written for Wayne McGregor and Random Dance in 1998, Still Time (2001) for the flutist Alejandro Escuer, Symbiont (2002) a multimedia collaboration with Miles Chalcraft, and Nights Bright Daies (2003) for the Ictus piano and percussion quartet; the latter premiered in June 2004 at the Festival Agora No 7 at IRCAM (Paris, France).

“Composition is, for me, like a giant puzzle in which the overall shape is fixed but the pieces and the picture itself change and undergo subtle transformations as one is constructing it. The computer tools that I use, enable me to fix the edges — the large scale rhythmic and harmonic movement and other global parameters, whilst also allowing me to improvise with these materials at the surface level. Using these tools allows me to manipulate and play with sound — like a child with a chemistry kit — reveling in the novel colours and explosive concoctions that result.”

— MA

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Mathew Adkins: biography

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