Kaffe Matthews is back on stage. A pioneering music maker who makes works live with space, data, things, and place to make new electro-acoustic compositions worldwide, her past research has included live sampling with the midi violin, theremin, star maps, conversations with ex-astronauts, shark journeys, solo walks and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, creating a massive body of works for sites such as concert halls, city streets, basement clubs, radio, galleries, deserts, living rooms, and the human body.
The physical experience of music is also key to her approach so she also invented unique interfaces such as the Sonic Armchair, the Sonic Bed, the Sonic Bike, the Environmental Bike and now the Buzz Bike, that not only enable new approaches to composition but give immediate ways in to unfamiliar sound and music for wide ranging audience.
In order to enable development of these practices, she established the collectives Music for Bodies(2006) and The Bicrophonic Research Institute(2013) where ideas and techniques are developed within a pool of coders and artists using shared and open source approaches, publishing all outcomes online.
Currently based in Berlin, she is again focused on making site specific, improvised and live performance, continuing to work with The Ripley, WORM and Caput Draconis. Modular electronic instruments designed using alchemical discoveries occupied with the generation and processing of all colours of noise. This practice has also led to her research into alchemy, the principle ideas of which she is applying to new compositional techniques and approaches.
Awards include a NESTA Dreamtime Fellowship, UK; Honorary Professor of Music at the Shanghai Music Conservatory; a Scottish BAFTA with Mandy McIntosh and Zeena Parkins; Distinction Prix Ars Electronica Sonic Bed_London, Honorary Mention Prix Ars Electronica cd cécile. Kaffe was also the first woman to receive the Edgar Varèse guest professorship in computer music at TU Berlin(2016) and in 2024 was awarded the Foreign Artist Award for outstanding achievements and artistic attitude of the Maria Anto and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven Art Prize, Poland.
She has been releasing solo works on Annette Works since 1996
kaffe explains – a short interview, Muzičiki Biennale Zagreb 2019
https://www.kaffematthews.net
http://www.annetteworks.com
http://www.sonicbikes.net
http://www.musicforbodies.net
@kaffematthews