A night of experimental music, sound, and kinship transmissions at DADA.

Catskills-based composer and sound artist Matthew O’Neill brings Through to Us to DADA for a special live preview of his forthcoming album, joined by Theatre of Divine Resonance and Herblore Esoterica.

Made in loving, direct collaboration with land, water, and the unseen world, Through to Us offers new ways of creating belonging beyond the human. The album emerges from years of listening, research, and embodied musical exploration, bringing together field recordings, synthesizers, acoustic instruments, microtonal elements, beat frequencies, and psychoacoustic phenomena.

O’Neill’s music offers portals into radical kinship with the living world. Through embodied relationships with place, sounds resonate in ways that invite expanded awareness — creating a feeling of closeness to the more-than-human and opening possibilities for how we might listen, relate, and live together.

The record moves between composition, improvisation, and soundscape immersion: music as reciprocity, remembrance, and relationship. It also marks a period of profound personal transformation and a deepening into O’Neill’s practice as a composer and sound artist.

Through to Us is out October 16 on Panther Mountain.

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 experimental composition, songwriting, rock and roll, field recording, and soundscape ecology, rooted in Indigenous musical ontologies — ways of knowing and participating through sound. For O'Neill, music is a way of deepening 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.

His work asks us to reconsider what might happen when listening becomes an act of relationship, reciprocity, and love.

Herb Lore (ambient, psych-folk, New Age) is an attempt at restraining & divesting oneself in order to achieve a oneness with the Natural World (& explore Spaces Unseen). Self-gathered field recording, meditative repetition, and restrained improvisation, evoke the Spirit of these natural places while Annie Dillard, The Transcendental Painting Group, & Gene Wolfe serve as Beacons to the project.

Theatre of Divine Resonance is a microtonal drone improvisation collective. Their compositions utilize intervals based on the harmonic series and the structures of sound itself. Elements of Indian classical khayal vocal, tuvan throat singing, slavic folk song, western minimalism and synth soundscapes reverberate in their mosaic of vibration. Brass, string, voice, synth, and flute unite in celestial harmony guiding your ears to the spirit realm.