Matthew Anderson is a composer, songwriter, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a 2017 New Amsterdam Records Composers Lab alum. As a singer-songwriter, Anderson flies under the moniker Sparrow, where he combines an avian melodic sense with complex rhythmic patterns and shifting textures uncaged from genre conventions. He releases ambient music as Sixty Ton Angel. This project has evolved from rumbling drones to organic sound stories that blur the line between liminal and centered sounds. His work as a composer has lead him to an ongoing collaboration with innovative filmmaker and multi-disciplinary artist Matthew Taylor.

Anderson originally hails from Northeast Ohio, where he was raised in a deeply religious environment. This, paired with an unconventional home-schooled upbringing, formed the idiosyncratic core of Anderson’s musical language, rooted in sacred choral and worship music. Grunge crashed into his life in middle school, and by college he was seeking out rare B-side collections from modern prog losers such as Porcupine Tree and Oceansize. Somewhere in between he discovered Talk Talk, Steve Reich, and Brian Eno, moving to New York in the process and becoming a heathen.

In the post-genre world of our moment, Anderson’s vernacular embodies an earnestly outsider voice; almost an insular alternate history. Yet his work is indelibly laced with a sense of the universal and the sacred; an almost childlike longing for oneness in an increasingly bifurcated world.

2025 will see the release of the 4th Sixty Ton Angel record on Hyle Tapes, Sparrow’s 4th record and return to live shows, and the dissemination of a secret project.