Matthew Lee Knowles studied at the Guildhall School and has written 90 songs, 2 operas, 19 string quartets, 7 theatre scores, 2 film scores, 2 opera librettos, 2 song cycles, a ballet, 250 works for solo piano, 5 concertos, 4 global happenings, 6 London happenings, 150 poems, thousands of instructional scores and graphic scores, hundreds of electronic works, 500 paintings, a 1000 page novel, 4 albums and several hundred miscellaneous compositions. He has been involved in several hundred performances and collaborated with hundreds of creatives and had dozens of works dedicated to him. In 2021 he finished “For Clive Barker” which now stands as the longest non-repeating piano piece ever written. During the pandemic, the pianist Kate Ledger livestreamed “For Alan Turing”, a seven-hour work which Matthew performed in 2012 for Alan Turing’s Centenary celebration at Cambridge University. He has been teaching piano since 2001.
La Chiva is a performance and visual artist, writer, and social worker. They have degrees in art history, social work, experimental performance and psychosocial studies from New York University, City University of New York, Central St Martins, and Birkbeck College. Their theatrical, performance and visual art works have been shown and performed in New York City, London, Athens, Hamburg, and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. For the last ten years they have worked independently as an expert witness in the UK family court system. Their solo album Desire the Rhinoceros, co-written with producer and Buzzcocks guitarist Mani Perazzoli, is due for release later in 2025.
Photo: Dominick Tyler
