"The problem is that although my arms and my legs and my head are not moving, I am bursting with energy. My breathing is shallow, I behave as if I am barely alive. And although I am bursting with energy my limbs will not move, the truth is clutched tightly in my muscles and if I move them the truth and the dawn will escape. Hear the birds? I do not fear them, they are the next day, which always comes, dawn or no dawn. We feel ourselves freeze in the time that is this frozen energy, this solid sound that engraves itself into our muscles this needle of sound but the light bounces off the tight muscles the roaring and immobile flesh that lies in the bed."

Michael J. Schumacher: Piano

Insomnia was developed with assistance from the Fundacion Valparaiso.

A New York City native, Matthew Ostrowski has been using live electronics since the early 1980s, working in improvised music, multimedia music-theater, and audio installations. He has shared the stage with everyone from David Behrman and John Zorn to Elizabeth Streb and the Flying Karamazov Bros., and has performed on three continents in more concerts than he cares to remember.
Recent projects include Draden, a performance/installation for amplified fluorescent lights, which has been seen in the US, the Netherlands, and Poland; and The Singing Building, a site-specific audio installation at the Eldridge Street Synagogue in New York City. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Wexner Center, the STEIM foundation in Amsterdam, and the University of Sheffield in England.
He has received commissions from European and American institutions. His work appears on over a dozen recordings.
Ostrowski has received many grants and awards, most recently from the Media Alliance and the New York Foundation for the Arts, which has given him a Computer Arts fellowship for 2001-2002.

[top]