Matt Evans
Idle Hands: Work Samples


Solo Albums + Live Arrangements


Gaia (2026)
— Studio Recording

Gaia is the cornerstone track from my latest album “Daydream Observatory,” an album that points its lens towards self-examination and charts a course through a constellation of interior worlds. Sparked by a misunderstanding of the term ‘'psychogeography,” the album inhabits landscapes of consciousness, personal reflections, and skittering emotions through a collection of ten synth-saturated, drum-driven, “zone poems.”

Gaia (2026)
— Live version arranged for 2 guitars, trumpet, flute, drums, and electronics

This live arrangement of Gaia features a mixture of direct transcription of the original musical material with some additional material improvised and added in response to the specific instrumentation.


An Infinite Cybernetic Meadow (2020)
— Studio Recording

An Infinite Cybernetic Meadow is from my first solo album, “New Topographics” an aqueous collection of drum driven, hypnotic soundscapes that collage together the sounds of writing, typing, morse code and others— swirling sonic byproducts from our communication systems— with percussive improvisations and synthesized “creatures” to trace imagined landscapes in a sea of noise. Synthetics and acoustics cross currents, unifying rubbery harmonies, wandering melodies, and incidental noises into a dreamy cybernetic ecology.

An Infinite Cybernetic Meadow (2023)
— Live version arranged for violin, saxophone, percussion, electric bass, drums, and electronics


Hyperbolic Time Chamber (2022)
— Studio Recording

Hyperbolic Time Chamber is a cut from my third solo record, “Soft Science.” The album is a collection of brightly-hued maximalist miniatures, combining squiggly free drumming and alien synthesizers. The album sews together equal parts millennial iconography (mushrooms / house plants / anime) and retro-futurist sci-fi (Sam Delaney, THX 1138, Ursula Le Guin) in an expression of waning utopic yearning.

Hyperbolic Time Chamber (2024)
— Live version arranged for piano, bass, drums, and electronics

This live arrangement of Hyperbolic Time Chamber is likely the most directly transcribed from the original, mapping winding synth arpeggios onto the piano with bass and drums holding down a meticulous cycling interplay..


For Oyster (2026)
— Studio Recording

For Oyster is the first track from my latest album “Daydream Observatory,” and one of the most subtle in my discography.

For Oyster (2026)
— Live version arranged for 25+ musicians

Likely the most open of my arrangements. This version, commissioned by the So Percussion Summer Institute, was devised to be played by every member of the festival. An hour of arrangments were done with this version of For Oyster as the concerts finale.


Classical Compositions


Sundogs (2019)
— for 2 violins, 2 violas, and boombox

Sundogs was commissioned by andPlay duo and Aperture duo in 2019 for their 2020 performances of [ a place is a place ].  The composition represents the title—a natural phenomenon where frozen water droplets refract the light of the sun to create mirage-like mock suns—while simultaneously using this phenomenon as a poetic expression of the refracted ways we experience a person after their death. The piece was the first I completed after the loss of my late partner Devra Freelander, whose sculptural and print practices often used optical phenomena like alpenglow and fata-morgana as inspiration. The core of the work is a melancholy chorale of shifting dissonances and consonances in and out of standard intonation that create a sunlike structure, eventually refracted by an amplification of ephemeral phenomena expressed through the subtle interaction of overtones and other resultant frequencies.

Listen to 8:10 to hear rubbery dissonant harmonies that interlace with sparkling harmonics over an impending pulse, and listen to 15:45 to hear translucent whistling harmonies transcend into whispering refracted patterns. The score is one of the more traditional in my catalog—an articulation of specific simplicity scored for execution with little rehearsal time.

mesh ii (2017)
— for violin, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, bass and drums

mesh ii is a spiraling work that matches rhythmic cycles and just-intonation harmonies to create a music that spins towards harmonic and rhythmic consonance in tandem.


Quilts (2016)
— for 2 drumkits, maraca, and synthesizer

I wrote Quilts in 2016 to play with my percussion ensemble Tigue. The music was written while in residence at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art during the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival, and was an ecstatic response to the wall drawings and conceptual structures of Sol Lewitt that line Mass MoCA’s walls. Using Euclidean rhythms (an expression of events across total possible positions) I was able to algorithmically express structures of density through time, creating an immersive composition that gains intensity to the end. Like Sol Lewitt’s wall drawings, logical systems govern the form of the composition, layering a small collection of rhythmic material in alternating permutations until all have been expressed. Ultimately, the composition was written to be a transcendent celebration of rhythm, a whirling declaration of pure neon energy. After teaching the music to the members of Tigue using simple “cheat sheet” scores with rhythms and formal structures, the piece quickly became one of our most performed compositions, a cornerstone of our sound, and a work we performed throughout the United States and Europe over multiple seasons.

Still Life No.1a + No.1b (2015)
— for piano and violin

Still Life No.1a + No.1b is the first classical composition I wrote after moving to New York. It’s an austere work in the minimalist paradigm that explores the expressivity of simple melodic permutations.