Composer and all-around TMT favorite Ellen Arkbro has returned to the world of recorded music with a piece titled “CHORDS For Organ.” The 16-minute track is off of her upcoming album, CHORDS.
On “CHORDS For Organ,” Arkbro returns with an even more minimalist approach than her previous release, For Organ and Brass. Here, the Stockholm-based composer dives into the materiality and harmonic quality of chords, carefully considering how the works occupy space rather than time. Like the best kinds of organs, Arkbro’s sounds like a slow-burning fire, subtly rising and falling, melting the listener’s sense of space in the process. As the minutes pass, she moves the composition along at a pace that doesn’t allow for settling in, instead forcing the audience to engage in an active listening of the current batch of complex chords.
“I listen to these chords with an interest in them as complete events in themselves and without any particular attention to their sequential occurrence,” Arkbro says. “To me, chords with a high degree of harmonic clarity display diamond-like qualities. There is sense of geometric complexity to the experience – both in very concrete terms, with regards to the ways in which these chords merge with acoustic space, but also on a more subtle level, on which harmony almost feels like space, and where the manifold ways of hearing these sounds spontaneously translate into modes of spatial awareness.”
Stream “CHORDS For Organ” below, and keep an ear out for CHORDS on June 7 via Subtext.
More about: Ellen Arkbro
