Bourne's success began in 2001 when he was named the
Perrier Young Jazz Musician of the Year. His success continued the following year when he was awarded the prize for Jazz Innovation at the BBC Radio Jazz Awards. In this period, Bourne was profiled in
The Observer Music Monthly as "the future sound of jazz". By this stage, Bourne had also become co-leader of The Electric Dr M, Distortion Trio and
Bourne/Davis/Kane, and was beginning to work in a wider context, leading to notable collaborations with artists and groups such as
Nostalgia 77,
Marc Ribot,
Paul Dunmall,
Annette Peacock,
John Zorn,
Pete Wareham,
Barre Phillips and
Tony Bevan. Bourne has been commissioned to write works for
Bath International Music Festival,
London Jazz Festival, Leeds Fuse Festival as well as from the pianist
Joanna MacGregor and
Faber Music. Bourne's work has been broadcast on various BBC radio and television programmes. mood marked a change in musical direction from the
avant-garde tone of his earlier work.
Montauk Variations caught the attention of
Amon Tobin and
Nancy Elizabeth, both of whom invited Bourne to rework their material, and Simon Green of
Bonobo selected the composition "Juliet" for inclusion in his release of the
Late Night Tales compilation series. In 2015, Bourne embarked on a UK tour with an audio/visual project entitled
Radioland. This was a collaboration with
Antoine Schmitt and
Franck Vigroux to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release of
Radio-Activity by
Kraftwerk. The Anglo-French trio "take the album’s melodies and textures as the starting point for avant-garde explorations" that saw Bourne performing on a variety of analogue
synthesisers as well as singing in
German through a
vocoder. Bourne's second solo album,
moogmemory, was released on The Leaf Label on 4 March 2016. This is the only album ever recorded with only the Lintronics Advanced Memorymoog, a
Memorymoog synthesiser converted by Rudi Linhard in a process which is the "equivalent of open heart surgery" replacing "1,300 components over eight weeks". A companion EP entitled
moogmemory plus was released in November 2016. The first three tracks were composed during the process of creating
moogmemory, but the release also includes new material and a cover version of "Sussudio" by
Phil Collins. Bourne returned to the piano for 2017's
Isotach. The music was recorded over an 18-month period at Bourne's home in West Yorkshire, mostly captured in snatched moments between soundtrack scores and session work.
The Guardian described the record as "spartan, hypnotic and beautiful, if gloriously unresolved" and stated that Bourne was playing "as if...thrilled by the sound of a piano". In 2018, Matthew Bourne was featured on the album
Nightports w/ Matthew Bourne by Nightports. Material for the album was recorded over three sessions in two locations. First at Matthew Bourne's house near Keighley, West Yorkshire in March 2015. The second and third sessions took place at Besbrode Pianos in
Leeds in October 2015 and June 2016. Material from
Nightports w/ Matthew Bourne was premiered on three pianos with live manipulations at Middleton Hall as part of the
Hull City Of Culture programme. Bourne collaborated with
Leaf Label partner
Keeley Forsyth on her 2020 album
Debris and EP
Photograph, as well as releasing an EP of remixes of music from his
moogmemory plus EP featuring Graham Massey, Sam Hobbs, Nostalgia 77, Broadway Project, Chris Sharkey, and Rex Rebo. This was made available as a
Bandcamp exclusive. ==Discography==