Those Who Walk Away is the post-classical project of Winnipeg composer Matthew Patton, who has worked under this moniker since the mid-2010s, following numerous scores, performances, and collaborations under his own name. Those Who Walk Away melds string quartet and choral materials with drone, electroacoustics, field recordings and erasure, to create durational elegiac works: as Patton says, "everything I have ever written is a Requiem." Patton often collaborates with Paul Corley (Sigur Rós, Jóhann Jóhannsson) on TWWA production and sound design. The project’s first major work, The Infected Mass, was initially staged in complete darkness in 2016 at Winnipeg’s Olympic-sized Pan-Am Pool, with a studio recording released on Constellation in 2017. Second album Afterlife Requiem (2026), was composed as a memorial to Jóhann Jóhannsson and incorporates short abandoned fragments from the late composer’s hard drive archives. Afterlife Requiem also involves musicians who previously worked with Jóhann—for Patton an essential component of the work, as an ongoing performance project, will be the inclusion of and collaboration with artists who had a relationship to Jóhannsson.
Patton was composer and curator of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra New Music Festival throughout the 2010s, mounting new works by Philip Glass, Jim Jarmusch, Glenn Branca, Meredith Monk, Jonny Greenwood, members of Sigur Rós, the Quay Brothers, Gavin Bryars, Lubomyr Melnyk, Tim Hecker, William Basinski, and Jóhann Jóhannsson, among many others. Since Jóhannsson’s death, Patton has also worked with the estate, alongside other friends and collaborators, to mount several Jóhannsson works and recordings, including the Deutsche Grammophon release of A Prayer To The Dynamo (2023), originally commissioned and assisted by Patton for the WSO New Music Festival in 2012.
In recent years, Patton composed the commissioned work The Limits of Almost for the 25th anniversary of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and has presented works by members of Sigur Rós, Brian and Roger Eno, and Stephen O’Malley, often in conjunction with Basilica Soundscape. Patton has also begun acting: he was cast in Universal Language (2024) by Matthew Rankin and Solitudes (2025) by Ryan McKenna. Moving in front of the camera has been an unexpected expansion of Patton’s many prior associations with the film world, among them writing and recording new music for the 2015 Criterion Collection release of Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, a new live music score for Maddin’s Tales from the Gimli Hospital, a series of self-directed experimental videos made for Those Who Walk Away’s Infected Mass Reworks EP (2026), and his ongoing collaboration with Karl Lemieux on a full-length experimental film to accompany Afterlife Requiem.
As an emerging composer in the 1980s, Patton scored his celebrated early work Speaking In Tongues (1988), a collaboration with Paul Taylor Dance Company, praised as "a masterpiece for our time" by the New York Times, released on Nonesuch and a 1992 Emmy recipient for its PBS Great Performances television production. The piece has been mounted in new productions at Paris Opera House, La Scala Opera House, The Kennedy Center, and most recently at Lincoln Center in November 2025, with an international tour revival happening in 2026-2027.
Patton holds a degree in Music Composition from the Manhattan School of Music and his early mentors included James Tenney, John Corigliano, and Frederic Rzewski. Patton also worked as an artist’s assistant with sculptor Richard Serra in New York City.
