Marc Matter

Research Focus

  • Sound Art and Experimental Composition
  • Text and Sound as Intermedia
  • Expanded DJing and Prepared Turntables
  • Sound Publishing
  • Semiotics of Sound

Curriculum Vitae

Artist and reserarcher Marc Matter (*1974) is active in experimental music and sound art since the mid-1990s. He holds a diploma in media art at KHM (Academy for Media Arts, Cologne), where he studied with Valie Export, Anthony Moore, and Siegfried Zielinski. He is a founding member of the artist’s collective Institut für Feinmotorik, specialized in a customized DJ-setup of eight prepared turntables. He has been curator and resident-DJ at Salon des Amateurs (Düsseldorf) and is a lecturer at Institut for Music and Media (Robert Schumann Music Conservatory, Düsseldorf), including the topics music and text, as well as semiotics of sound.

After finishing his PhD at Hamburg University – a study on artistic methods involving sound technology in language-based sound works – he moved to Berlin in early 2024 where he, together with Andreas Bülhoff, started the label Spoken Matter for releasing sound poetry and experimental spoken word. In the last few years, he focused on the relationship between sound and language, composing several works for radio broadcasts (SWR, WDR, Deutschlandfunk Kultur etc.) and performing his work live.

As a reasarcher, he was a fellow at the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Yale Unviersity where he studied the personal papers of sound poet and publisher Henri Chopin. He was also a researcher at Jan van Eyck Academy (Maastricht), where he did research on the sound alphabet by Lettrist artist Isidore Isou.

Selected Publications and Performances

  • Could Change Word Composition on Vinyl/DL (Futura Resistenza) 2022
  • Deconceptual Voicings (wit Stefan Römer) songs made out of interviews with artists (Mount Analogue / Slim Volume) 2019