Kaffe Matthews :: July 15, 2009; 8:00 pm :: Cafe Oto, 18 - 22 Ashwin Street, London.

Kaffe Matthews was born in Essex, England, and lives and works in London. Since 1996 she has been making new electro-acoustic music through a system of self designed software matrices through which she pulls and pushes different sounds live. The variety of sounds, things and places she has worked with have ranged from self played violin and theremin, sounds of spaces, kite strings on an uninhabited Scottish Island, flight data from NASA scientists, Scottish and Irish pipers, melting ice in Quebec, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, vibrating wires in the West Australian outback and recently a Vietnamese monochord and seaside sounds processed with 11-year-olds to be dispersed by visitor pedaled bicycles. She has just returned from a month of working with sharks and conservation scientists on the Galapagos Islands.

In 2006 she established the collective research project Music for Bodies, making music to feel rather than just listen to through specialist sonic interfaces. With the Worldwide Bed project intending to build its seventh Bed, her research is now developing outdoor concrete Benches in Hackney, with the first now permanently installed in Mexico City.

Kaffe continues to regularly collaborate, and was an Artistic Advisor to STEIM, (electronic music studios) Amsterdam, NL. Her 2004
collaboration Weightless Animals was awarded a BAFTA, she received a NESTA Dreamtime Fellowship in 2005 and an Award of Distinction, Prix Ars Electronica 2006 for the work Sonic Bed_London. In February 2006 she was made an Honorary Professor of Music, Shanghai Music Conservatory, China and in 2009 a patron of the Galapagos Conservation Trust shark project..

Recent works include: The Marvelo Project (2008), work for bicycles and GPS connected scores, Folkestone Triennial; Sonic Bench_Mexico,(2007) Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City; Body Abiding (2007), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Glasgow, Scotland; Sonic Bed_Shanghai,(2006), Xuhui Art Museum, Shanghai, China; Three Crosses of Queensbridge,(2005) work for bicycles + radios, the Drawing Room, London; No-one here but us chickens (2005), TATE Modern, London, UK. Her stereo solo works are released and available through Annette Works.