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SHORTER BIO:

I’m a composer, originally from Yorkshire (UK), currently living in Copenhagen, and studying in Aarhus (DK). I often work at an intersection between music for instruments and voices; electronic sound; text; video; and performance. My work regularly engages with a re-contextualisation of everyday sounds, objects, and automatic, repetitive behaviours to reveal the latently musical in the banal.

 

Recent pieces have involved, amongst other things, documentary techniques; self-reflexivity; audience participation; repetition; custom-built, tactile electronic instruments; YouTube comments sung by a choir and virtual singer soloist; and spatialised orchestral music performed on top of mountains, in train stations, in swimming pools, and in remote communities.

 

Recent commissions have come from Riot Ensemble / Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (for percussionist Sam Wilson); The Night With… (for The Hermes Experiment); Hebrides Ensemble / Edinburgh Book Festival; The Cumnock Tryst (for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra)

 

My music has been programmed at festivals such as: Darmstädter Ferienkurse (DE); Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK); Matera Intermedia (IT); St Magnus International Festival (UK); Visiones Sonoras (MX); EviMus (DE); Sound-Image (UK).

I am a member of Aarhus-based composer-performer group Current Resonance, regularly contributing to meticulously curated intermedial events. As a performer, I have played music by artists such as Jessie Marino, Louis d'Heudieres, James Saunders, Joss Smith, Lil Lacy, Simon Løffler, Caitlin Rowley, Nina Fukuoka, John Zorn, Heather Frasche, Michael Hope, Mikołaj Laskowski and Monika Szpyrka, as well as regularly performing in my own work.

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Photography by @jadefrancesphoto 

"Matthew Grouse's music is bursting with inner life and technical surplus. With a sharp analytical and perhaps satirical outlook, he introduces everyday technologies, google-searches read aloud and banal actions placed on an equal footing with traditional instruments, in works that manage to engage and retain the listener." - Dansk Komponist Forening NYE VEJE committee (translated from Danish)

"...contemporary music that recognised no boundaries whatsoever." - Keith Bruce, The Herald

"...The most striking (piece was) Matthew Grouse’s Left Right, Left Right, performed by percussionist Sam Wilson." - Andrew Clements, The Guardian

"...a quirky electro-acoustic melange of mundane ritual." - Ken Walton, The Scotsman

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