Matthew O'Neill to Release THROUGH TO US LP, Announces Fall Tour
The Catskills-based composer recorded the title track outdoors, blending synthesizer, piano, and natural sound.
Catskills-based composer, songwriter, and sound artist Matthew O'Neill has announced his new album, Through to Us, set for release October 16 via his nonprofit label, Panther Mountain. Through to Us is a collection of experimental compositions shaped through direct collaboration with land, water, and the unseen — field recordings, synthesizers, acoustic instrumentation, and alternative recording techniques woven together through deep listening and an ongoing relationship with place. It moves between electro-acoustic composition, ambient music, microtonality, and soundscape, resisting easy genre placement. Here, the recording process itself becomes part of the musical language. The album is available for pre-order from Bandcamp.
With the announcement, O'Neill has also shared the title track and video 'Through to Us.' The piece began as a soundscape composition recorded where O'Neill lives in the Catskill Mountains; recording in a wooden studio with the doors and windows open, he responded intuitively on synthesizer and piano, letting the surrounding landscape enter the composition as it unfolded. Metal bars played on cedar logs, antler scraped across wet stone, these became further ways of listening, responding, and engaging the land as a direct collaborator.
'The title 'Through to Us' refers to the sense that something beyond what is immediately visible or understood can reach us through sound, place, synchronicity, and presence,' O'Neill explains. 'The piece marks an arrival in my compositional practice: an experimental approach shaped through deep listening and direct collaboration with land, water, and the unseen.'
O'Neill heads out on tour this fall with dates in New York, Arizona, and California. Information on dates is available here.
Matthew O'Neill is a composer, sound artist, songwriter, and cultural producer based in the Catskill Mountains. He is the founder and executive director of Panther Mountain, a nonprofit music label and cultural restoration initiative supporting Indigenous artists, ancestral listening practices, and reciprocal relationships with land and community.
His work spans songwriting, rock and roll, experimental composition, field recording, and soundscape ecology, rooted in Indigenous musical ontologies — ways of knowing and participating through sound. For O'Neill, music is less entertainment than a way of entering relationship: with land and water, memory and ancestry, other beings, the unseen, and the larger ecological and cosmic systems we're part of. He works directly with more-than-human worlds, combining field recordings, instruments, voice, synthesis, guitar, and alternative recording techniques — some sounds heard, others sensed through attention, duration, synchronicity, and embodied listening.
Through to Us's ten pieces merge field recordings with synths, piano, and upright bass into sonic tapestries — immersive in the way one's eyes adjust to the dark on a night walk outdoors, tactile as running a hand through an open stream.
The album is the result of what O'Neill calls a lifelong practice of engagement with Indigenous musical ontologies. 'It's central to maintaining balance as a culture and a person,' he explains. 'The biggest part of my practice over the years has been creating music in reciprocity with the land and all the life around me. There's no separation between the listening and the making. It's a circle of relationship-building and creating through listening.'
Through to Us also points toward where O'Neill's practice is headed: site-responsive music built through long-term engagement with particular places and the beings, histories, and relationships within them. 'I hope the album helps people remember ourselves as part of the land and the waters, and encourages us to create new worlds and positive futures in collaboration with the living world.'
For O'Neill, music is a way of being in relationship—a practice of listening, responding, and reciprocity.
Tour Dates
Oct 14 Ridgewood, NY @ Dada
Oct 17 Prescott, AZ @ Fairweather Club
Oct 18 Topanga, CA @ Endless Color
Tracklist
1. After The Snow Currents
2. Through To Us
3. Owl Lit
4. Monhegan Reaches
5. Descent
6. Panther Brook
7. She Went Home
8. Ferocity Required
9. Lake Curve Edge
10. When She Calls From Above The Water
Photo Credit: Viktorsha Uliyanova | Hi-res here
Photo Credit: Viktorsha Uliyanova | Hi-res here
