Ellen Arkbro (Photo: Victoria Loeb)
Suoni Per Il Popolo: Ellen Arkbro and No Hay Banda x Alvin Lucier
ARTICLE
Z Neto Vinheiras
6/25/20262 min read
Another night I was looking forward to. We could see those faces we usually do in the local scenes of experimental, ambient and drone once again at L’Église du Sacré Coeur-de-Jésus.
No Hay Banda performed “Swing Bridge”, a 35min piece composed by Alvin Lucier in 2016. It’s a piece for two violins, cello, double bass, voice, C trumpet (replaced by two trombones for this performance), organ and pitch wavers who modulate the microtones through the organ pipes directly.
The first word-image I came up with after 10min into the performance was brain atrophy, in the best possible way. I felt my neurons re-organising with the acoustics–both of the church and that of my skull–there was a sense of distrust, which frequencies am I really hearing and where exactly are they coming from? The instrument? In the clash with other frequencies in the air? A refraction? Is my ear sending mixed signals to my brain and thus producing new ones?
While it’s not a piece to settle in, there are both moments of discomfort, friction, and epiphany, sometimes happening at the same time. Undulations, pulsations, rugosities, tensions, “noise” stretched into a limited number of notes–it’s almost a psychedelic experience and greatly performed by No Hay Banda.
Ellen Arkbro comes next up on the pipe organ stage at the back. Warm, fuzzy, maybe more romantic, she performs “Nightclouds”, released in late May through the Blank Forms Editions. Here, I laid down on the church’s floor, closed my eyes and let myself into those clouds of the night. The harmonies keep playing around with my brain’s acoustics but also my chest’s this time–on a more emotional tone, the drift is inevitable and I only wished it lasted longer.
“Nightclouds” is primarily a set of improvisations, clusters playing with tone and texture, and although warm and beat-less, they’re no lullabies–perhaps a set of changing colours or pieces of a story, pieces of changing clouds or joyful meditations, still tainted with a natural hint of melancholy. It’s a work that absorbs and leaves you feeling a little lighter, sighing a relieving “ah…” by the end.
Ellen Arkbro — Tyska Kyrkan
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