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, Bjork) on TWWA production and sound design, recording strings and singers in Reykjavik, and in Winnipeg. The project’s first major work, The Infected Mass, was initially staged in 2016, with a recorded version released on Constellation in 2017.
Patton was a curator and Artistic Director of Winnipeg’s WSO New Music Festival for several years, helping to mount new works by Jim Jarmusch, Gleen Branca, Lee Ranaldo, the Quay Brothers, Lubomyr Melnyk, Tim Hecker, and Jóhann Jóhannsson, among many others. Patton also worked with the Jóhannsson estate to help mount several posthumous Jóhannsson works and recordings, including the Deutsche Grammophon release of A Prayer To The Dynamo (2023), originally commissioned by Patton and previously performed only once, at WSO New Music in 2012. The second album by Those Who Walk Away, Afterlife Requiem (2025), is dedicated to Jóhannsson and incorporates short abandoned fragments from the late composer’s hard drive archives.
Most recently, Patton composed the commissioned work The Limits of Almost for the 25th anniversary of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and presented works by Brian and Roger Eno, Philip Glass, and Stephen O’Malley, several of which 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 is an adventitious expansion of Patton’s long associations with the film world, among them writing and recording new music for the 2015 Criterion Collection release of Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, and his ongoing collaboration with Karl Lemieux on a full-length experimental film accompanying Afterlife Requiem by Those Who Walk Away.
As an emerging composer in the 1980s, Patton scored the 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, and a 1992 Emmy recipient for its PBS Great Performances television production. The piece has been staged at Paris Opera House, La Scala, The Kennedy Center, and Lincoln Center (most recently in revival in November 2025).
Patton is a graduate in Music Composition from the Manhattan School of Music, where his early mentors included James Tenney and John Corigliano. He teaches new music at the University of Manitoba, and is a guest lecturer on contemporary Icelandic music and culture.
