Biography
Matthew Gallagher, an acclaimed visual artist and sculptor who makes his home in Cleveland, adopts the alias Machine Listener when pursuing free-form electronic music projects. Recordings such as the 2019 album Colubrid demonstrate his approach of layering fractured, unpredictable beat patterns over fluid, shifting synth textures.
Gallagher has organized and overseen the annual Voice of the Valley Noise Rally in West Virginia since the late 2000s. After completing his studies in Studio Art and Technology in Music and Related Arts at Oberlin College in 2013, he received the AICUO Excellence in Visual Arts Grand Award as a senior. He founded both a performance and visual arts lab and a related performance series, each titled Research & Development. Beginning in 2013, he issued Machine Listener cassettes that encompassed modular synth improvisations as well as “electromagnetic field recordings.” Tusco/Embassy released his debut vinyl LP, the drone-based Endless Coil, in 2016. The project Le Creuset, formed with Jake Johnson, delivered a self-titled LP the following year. Hausu Mountain put out Colubrid—one of Machine Listener’s more beat-heavy recordings—in 2019.
Gallagher has organized and overseen the annual Voice of the Valley Noise Rally in West Virginia since the late 2000s. After completing his studies in Studio Art and Technology in Music and Related Arts at Oberlin College in 2013, he received the AICUO Excellence in Visual Arts Grand Award as a senior. He founded both a performance and visual arts lab and a related performance series, each titled Research & Development. Beginning in 2013, he issued Machine Listener cassettes that encompassed modular synth improvisations as well as “electromagnetic field recordings.” Tusco/Embassy released his debut vinyl LP, the drone-based Endless Coil, in 2016. The project Le Creuset, formed with Jake Johnson, delivered a self-titled LP the following year. Hausu Mountain put out Colubrid—one of Machine Listener’s more beat-heavy recordings—in 2019.
Albums
