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..a veritable Who's Who of the burgeoning US improv scene: Bhob Rainey, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Tom Djll, Matt Ingalls, John Shiurba, Damon Smith, Scott Rosenberg, Scott Looney, Stefan Dill, Mike Bullock, Matthew Sperry, Greg Kelley...The list goes on." - from a featured article on Jack Wright by Dan Warburton, Signal to Noise #27 [fall 02]
Seated at the sound mixer amid the audience rather than before them, Matt Ingalls was armed with an ancient turntable and a decidedly vintage computer keyboard and monitor. Grabbing the tone arm and slamming or scraping the cartridge across vinyl, he produced brutalised blasts of noise that were then resectioned in his computer, with recombinant patterns born of the sonic shards triggered by his keyboard. - Richard Henderson, The Wire #208 [06.01]
The best of the concert was its second half, devoted to works by Matt Ingalls and David Sampson and the Ingalls work, CrusT for Clarinet and Tape nearly overshadowed the rest of the concert. In this tightly crafted interplay of electronics and soloist, Ingalls managed the tape console while Robert Bailis, the Citywinds clarinetist, was the solo performer. Throughout the concert, Bailis shone with a sweet, singing tone, but in CrusT he also displayed a wide range of technical wizardry.
The 13-minute CrusT starts relatively simply, the clarinet part building gradually through an abundance of trills and eventually soaring through a long improvised cadenza about six minutes into the work. A long, climactic sequence of electronics alone follows, building to a roar like a jet engine before dissipating into a cascade of clattering sounds. This proves to be a natural launching point for the soloist to work back into the soundscape (with staccato passages recalling the jazzy finale of Aaron Copland’s Concerto for Clarinet) and eventually the piece works toward a transfixing ending. The clarinet slips away on a quiet sustained note that reflects the work’s opening.
The tape for CrusT is based on sounds of an actual clarinet — presumably from the Oakland-based composer/performer’s own instrument. Despite the wide range of sounds emanating from the tape, simple rhythmic gestures and pitch and register relationships bind soloist to electronics. Ingalls effectively manipulates the clarinet’s mechanical and acoustic quirks to give the tape a satisfying interactive role. The integration with Bailis was so good that it seemed irrelevant who or what was producing which sound. We were enveloped by clarinet: its sassy, cool, and purr pushed to the nth degree but never into the kind of a grand joke or tone painting that marked Morton Subotnik’s landmark clarinet/tape works of a few decades ago.
- Jeff Rosenfeld, San Francisco Classical Voice
Xenakis' pieces served as the bookends for the program ... Anaktoria (1969) for eight wind and string players began with an austere opening horn line from David Granger. The bleating horn was then joined by the shrill cry of Matt Ingalls' clarinet and seemed to go on far too long. Ingalls adroitly hurdled the several multi-phonic sections and when called on to crescendo from out of nothingness to a full volume, sounded like something from a distant epoch. This simple and agonizingly slow crescendo after a fury of string activity rang true in the unmarred acoustics of the chapel and was by far the highlight of the piece. - John Demma Van Hagen, San Francisco Classical Voice
Matt Ingalls' Invalid Sync was shapeless sonic tinkering, and although scratching sounds from a violin while jabbing at the computer keyboard with his toes would seem to be an important performance element, he did so crouched on the floor where few could see him. - John Henken, Electronic Festival Puts Art in the Back Seat, Los Angeles Times
It's Matt Ingalls' again (he played clarinet on “Piso Mojado”). Evidently this boy has learned a few lessons from wizard and elf Malcolm Goldstein in Vermont and Montreal. How could anyone otherwise play the violin this magnificent way? It's great that Malcolm has a following in the performance practice of gifted musicians. Malcolm just recently told me he was starting to feel old, when talking about touring, so a following is necessary! The violin scrapings are appearing through a denser, revolving sound curtain of undetected depths. The violin emerges dry, while the other sounds are echoing far and wide.- Sonoloco Review of SHOW
His Opus 415 piece (Crust) was a brilliant integration of brittle, powerful electronics with live clarinet playing, and definitely one of the most dynamic solo sets I've ever seen. He's also a funny and provocative guy... - Jake Rodriquez, Hot Rodney's Bar and Grill @ The Delivery Room
Matt Ingalls is one of the most accomplished, most creative clarinetists on the bay area scene. He has performed on the Day of Noise several times, and a small part of one of those performances was featured on the Live at KZSU: 1998 disk. A personal favorite of mine remains the PISS release on the Limited Sedition label (where PISS stands for Perkis, Ingalls, Sperry and Shiurba... and it is probably no accident that 3 out of those 4 are playing on the Day of Noise this year). In some of his more recent work he has gone in the direction of collaborating with an artificial performer CLal(r)E, using some software of his own design. - Doom, KZSU-Stanford Radio-90.1fm
Ingalls' endeavors into `cut-up' music is taken to a new plateau in this 2'30" shot to the head "Scherzo: Allegro molto". His application of `classical' composition formula to such relatively short bust of sound was a feat in itself. My only qualm was in the programming; to have this piece follow Cage's "Willams Mix" seemed to diminish its impact. - Hans Grüsel - review of the transparent tape music festival II posted on Brutal Sound Effects
MATH INGALLS: Fingerling. It starts off young math is talking us through his music he will play soon on the clarinet, some sounds then a crowd, come on Math play!! then the sounds of 6 yr old Math hitting a few notes. Cut up brainball gets kicked around. LOUD! It goes all over and ends up under the bridge in Austin waiting for the bats to come out to eat bugs. We are in the dark waiting with a crowd. They come out. More cut up start up nuts. The crowd goes wild when the lights come up!! This piece had other parts of his old stuff thrown in here but the sound system made it worth the 3rd listen. Could do this every year. Great great great. As Bran..Pos put it "great use of the room". - bonniac, review of the transparent tape music festival I posted on Brutal Sound Effects
ABB-EBB was an almost entirely different ensemble than expected. Brian Kane (the only holdover), Matt Ingalls, and Scott Rosenberg on clarinets and saxophones; Morgan Guberman and [someone I've forgotten] on small percussion. The set was largely interesting: original compositions by Kane and Ingalls which dealt with schemes for playing together and apart, tiny solos (almost anti-solos), and very sparse textures. The quintet surrounded the audience, making the music seem even more open and without center. My favorite piece was one by Ingalls in which all played a single repeated note together at times and slightly out of phase at other times, with little interludes in between. - Dan Plonsey Beanbender's Reviews.
"The program concluded with spout by Matt Ingalls. The first half of his composition reminded me of Ligeti's Double Concerto; the conclusion suggested the opening of The Chairman Dances by John Adams." - Karl Miller, Austin American-Statesman
Other Articles Mentioned
A HEAR THIS Feature written by Sam Prestianni in the SF WeeklysfSound plays Masaoka [sfweekly 4.11.01]
Sonic Revival [sfweekly 5.10.00]
Sonic Revival [sfweekly 5.10.00]
Bargain Bin [bay guardian 2002]
Cinema for the Ear [east bay ex-press 1.2.02]
The musicians themselves were terrific...the swirling scales of Ingalls' clarinet.... - Sarah Cahill, East Bay EXPRESS
Artist of the Week [the mills weekly 2.10.95]
Electronic Musician [csound article 12.98]
Electronic Musician [csound article 10.00]
Electronic Musician [ csound article 7.02]
Keyboard [csound article 1.97]