|
 |
|||||||
< back to list |
|
A New York City native, Matthew Ostrowski spent much of the '80s in the then-flourishing downtown improvisation scene, playing antique synthesizers, amplified plates of glass, and broken tape recorders in a long string of low-ceilinged venues whose names are now lost to memory, honing his skills onstage with the usual Downtown suspects: Zeena Parkins, Nicolas Collins, John Zorn, Anthony Coleman, and that bunch. He was also
the tape-loop and drum machine player for the so-called rock band Krackhouse, which was blissfully free of a guitarist at the time. In addition, he wasted a great deal of his time on practically unperformable multimedia music-theater pieces, incorporating actors, video, slides, and kitchen sinks, including The Ruin, performed at New Music America, Vox Dei for 4 vocalists, sampler, and video, and most recently Guilty, (based on the '40s film noir classic Double Indemnity) for 4 voices, piano, bassoon, strings, and electronics. Forays outside the new music ghetto include audio installations, shown in New York City, Holland, and Switzerland and music for theater in Philadelphia and New York. From 1993 to '99, he was composer-in-residence for the high-speed, high-impact
Elizabeth Streb/ Ringside dance company, amplifying and processing walls, floors, and trampolines. In 1993, he abandoned New York for the Netherlands, trading his battered '70s synth for a battered '80s computer in a hunt for ever more powerful means to reproduce the ferocious racket in his own head. This has resulted in (amongst other
things) a series of live solo pieces for computer-driven sampler, culminating in his massive work Vertebra, released last year on Pogus records. Ostrowski has appeared on over a dozen recordings, has toured everywhere from California to Australia, and has received various minor accolades and laurel wreaths for his work. He currently
divides his time between Holland and the USA.