racecar racecar racecar opens tonight and it has some of my best work ever as a designer and a composer. melory & cast have created a surreal and hilarious and terrifying journey for you all. i hope you’ll see it.
as is becoming a tradition for me, please consider listening to the score for RRR on my Bandcamp (link in bio). This is my atonal era, my classical nightmare era, and my best work for strings yet. “Palindromes: a suite” represents months of study and composition for me in a new style.
thank you also to my friend ezri who created this album cover while listening the the design we made.
And it would not exist without the play that prompted it. The world is beautiful and strange and i hope you’ll find your world stranger after you see the play and hear what i have to offer.
xoxo
mattie
this is my last orchestral/soundtrack release for this year. Imaginary Friends is an overture I composed for @portlandcenterstage ’s fall 2025 production of “Primary Trust,” written by Eboni Booth and directed by @thechipmiller . Sound design was by @philjohnsonlive , who also contributed incredible and formative feedback to the development of this piece.
This piece is a stitched together (and hopefully nicely contiguous) amalgam of the main theme, variations on that theme, the theme “for a french restaurant,” and what I came to call the “Big Glissando” theme, which was inspired by the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.”
This piece was written for 3 clarinets, 2 horns, two trombones, violin viola cello bass, percussion, piano, synthesizer, guitar and accordion. Yes, I did play the accordion on this (badly). Again, as with The Storyteller, organic and synthetic textures interweave with classical and contemporary composition techniques.
as always, link in bio and thank you for reading this long ass caption ❣️
proud to release my second soundtrack album in partnership with my dear friend and closest of collaborators, Martín Aguas. @sjawkward wrote a beautiful play, and it was our honor to create this sonic world. Link to the record is in my bio.
These compositions were used as pre/post show music and sampled throughout the play as interstitial music in @artistsrep ‘s 2025 production of The Storyteller, written by Sara Jean Accuardi and directed by Luan Schooler.
Much love to this beautiful theater piece and all who came to see and hear it!
- Mattie and Martín
A handful of notes about our techniques:
- Layering and looping of organic and electronic instruments
- Time signature, key signature, and tempo phasing between different orchestral parts
- Construction of two different “star machines” with guitar, electronic piano, glockenspiel sampling, arpeggios and LFO control
- Classical voice leading and counterpoint combined with modern production techniques
PRIMARY TRUST opens tonite @portlandcenterstage !!!!
@philjohnsonlive and i have made music and design that is magical and mystical for you. also it’s been a thrill to work with @canoed_sun on playing for this piece. see me play on oct 10 23 24 25 & 26 and hear my music every other night!
