Kaffe Matthews began her music career playing bass and percussion for the feminist band The Fabulous Dirt Sisters in the 1980s, touring Europe on busking tours and at demonstrations. When the group disbanded, Matthews began exploring electroacoustic composition, soon completing a Master of Art degree in Music Technology at University of York. Performing at first with a computer and violin, and later as a pioneer in laptop music, Matthews founded a record label (Annette Works) to release her solo works and continued to perform, compose and teach. 

By the early 2000s, disillusioned by the improv music scene, Matthews began to interrogate the ways and means by which people listen to music, inventing the Sonic Bed in 2005 and following that with sonic benches and sonic bikes. Matthews founded the collective Music for Bodies in 2006 and The Bicrophonic Research Institute in 2014, a group of coders and artists which develops and shares sonic bike technology globally. In 2020, Matthews released her first solo album in 17 years, Foreigner,an exploration of the stereo field of sounds from an accordion discovered in a Ghent second hand shop. Kaffe Matthews lives and works in Berlin.