Matthew Noone is an Australian-Irish ex-indie rocker, improviser, composer, artist-scholar and performer of the 25 stringed Indian sarode. After beginning his musical career as a guitarist and drummer in Brisbane in the mid 90s, Matthew fell in love with the sarode during a trip to India in 2003. He has studied North Indian Classical music for two decades with Sougata Roy Chowdhury in Kolkata and with UK based sarodiya, K. Sridhar. He performs Indian classical music across the globe and composes in a diverse range of disciplines ranging from Irish traditional music, free improvisation and contemporary electroacoustic music.
He has collaborated with artists such as Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill, Tommy Hayes, Sean Tyrell, K. Subramaniam, Liam Ó Maonlai, Seán Mac Erlaine, Catherine Sikora, Slavek Kwi and Steve Cooney. Matthew has released two albums of new arrangements of traditional music with percussionist Tommy Hayes (An Tara) and in 2017 released his debut solo album LET LUV B UR GURU featuring twenty-three original compositions using sarode, fiddle, ukulele, loops and drones.
He plays two unique custom made hybrid sarodes commissioned by Music Network Ireland. One of these instruments was designed particularly for playing Irish traditional music and the second is an electroacoustic 'dream' sarode for exploring new composition. Matthew is also an Irish Research Council scholar and was awarded a PhD for his work exploring the performance of Irish music and completed a postdoctoral fellowship investigating electroacoustic music improvisation. His research interests include cultural hybridity, phenomenology, consciousness and deep ecology. He is the Course Director of the BA in World Music at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick. He lives in East Clare.
“beautiful and timeless music that effortlessly creates bridges - between cultures, between places, between seemingly unrelated musical traditions”
[Cian Ó Cíobháin, An Taobh Tuathail,RTÉ RnaG]
“delicate and mesmeric”
[Sound Out, RTE Lyric FM]
“He lifts the listener to a different plane of existence”
[Folk Radio UK]
"Nothing short of pure magic”
[Hot Press magazine]