From the always remarkable hands of Blank Forms, come two new stunning LPs from the Stockholm based composer Ellen Arkbro: ‘Nightclouds’, comprising five minimalist improvisations for solo organ, and ‘How do I know if my cat likes me?’, made within a trio with Hanne Lippard and Hampus Lindwall, interweaving wry conceptualism and topical humor with poetics, voice, texture, and tone. Each absolutely brilliant and distinct, they stand as some of the most exciting works we’ve encountered from Arkbro - among the most important voices in contemporary experimental music - since her widely celebrated debut, ‘For Organ And Brass’, from 2017.

Over the last few years, we’ve found ourselves with no shortage of praise for the New York based curatorial platform, publisher, and record label Blank Forms. Almost entirely unique in the landscape of experimental art and sound, they’ve brought forth a vast range of material at a startling pace - archival and contemporary texts and music - as well as presenting concerts, exhibitions, and talks. Central to the initiative’s output is their label, which, since launching in 2017, has delivered groundbreaking releases by Charlemagne Palestine, Don Cherry, Maryanne Amacher, Judith Hamann, Atrás Del Cosmos, The Shadow Ring, James Rushford, Jerry Hunt, Takehisa Kosugi, Akio Suzuki, and numerous others, collectively building bridges between various idioms of experimental practice, across their historical and contemporary realizations. Following an incredibly prolific 2024, the label’s been relatively quiet so far this year, but as is so often the case, good things come for those who wait.

Born in 1990, Ellen Arkbro belongs to a generation of ambitious young composers who began to emerge from Stockholm during the 2010s. Initially trained as a singer with a focus on jazz, before shifting focus to study at the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) and the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, where she received her degree in Electroacoustic Music Composition, and expanded her already rich sonic vocabulary through studies with La Monte Young and Marc Sabat, as well as through her work within Catherine Christer Hennix’s Kamigaku Ensemble. Working in both acoustic instrumentation and synthesis, her work is largely rooted in investigations of intervallic harmony in just intonation - pursuing listening as an active process of creative participation - manifesting as remarkably rich minimalist pieces which have been met by wide acclaim in live performance and via the LPs, ‘For Organ And Brass’ (2017), ‘Chords’ (2019), and ‘Sounds While Waiting’ (2023), all of which have contributed to her becoming regarded as one of the most exciting composers currently working within the landscape of experimental sound.

There’s something difficult to pin down in Arkbro’s work; a focus, consideration, and ambition that sets her apart from her peers. Her compositions, for all of their elegance and grace, feel hard fought and like every choice has resulted in precisely the desired effect. This is no less the case for ‘Nightclouds’, her fourth full-length, which collects five improvisations for solo organ, recorded across Central Europe between 2023 and 2024. While rooted in a more open approach toward composition than some of her previous efforts, the album remains defined by the rigor and precision that has always defined Arkbro’s work, while drawing upon a process that expands her previous explorations of spatialized harmony, tactility, and texture, by drawing upon influences taken from sacred music, ECM-style jazz, and downtown minimalism, enveloping the ear in slowly emerging structures that envelop the ear in dirge-like washes built from complex harmonic intersections.

Drawing upon specificities of a variety of spaces and the unique characters of different organs, ‘Nightclouds’ begins with the piece from which the album draws its name, encountering Arkbro performing simultaneously on the Sauer organ and Utopa Baroque organ at Orgelpark in Amsterdam. Constructed from a slowed down and stretched, continuously modulated harmonic progression, the composer draws profound depth from the piece’s elegant, simple chordal scaffolds that support rich, ever-shifting textures, which are echoed on a variation piece that concludes the album’s first side, built from loops of three of the chords from the more expansive version of ‘Nightclouds’.

From here, Arkbro moves into palpably more intimate ground with ‘Still Life’ and ‘Chordalities,’ two short works recorded at the Temple de La-Tour-de-Peilz in Vevey, Switzerland, during Arkbro’s time at La Becque | Artist Residency: the first being a drone work, built from sustained chords with only a few subtle changes occurring over its duration, while the second is played entirely on the organ stops, unspools in a billowing progression, rocking between airy breaths and subtle harmonic elements, and unleashed howls of markedly different characters. The second side is entirely dedicated to the longform work ‘Morningclouds’, recorded in the reconstructed Gedächtniskirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church) in Berlin. Rooted in Arkbro’s long-standing focus on form and structure, interweaving two returning themes, forming immersive shifts through chord changes that rock like a ship in gentle seas, transforming harmonic simplicity into a deeply affecting sonic landscape imbued with a profound sense of emotional depth.

Among her most engrossing bodies of work since her wildly celebrated debut, ‘For Organ And Brass’ (2017), with ‘Nightclouds’ - her first release with Blank Forms, co-issued with La Becque Editions - Ellen Arkbro furthers her status as one of the most important composers working in experimental music today.

Moving into slightly more uncharted waters, the second in Blank Forms’ latest batch of LPs encounters Ellen Arkbro in a trio configuration with Hanne Lippard and Hampus Lindwall, intertwining Lippard’s deeply poetic expressions of text, Lindwall’s strong abstract sensibility, with her minimal expressions. Regular readers of these texts will already be well aware of both Hanne Lippard and Hampus Lindwall. Lippard is an English, Berlin based artist who has been working across the fields of text, vocal performance, sound installation, printed objects and sculpture, for more than a decade, with a practice that rests at the juncture of the spoken and written word, drawing upon content appropriated from the public sphere (found text) intertwined with her own words, investigating how the rise in digital communication and mediation reprograms our relationship to language. Lindwall, on the other hand, belongs to a generation of artists who emerged in Stockholm prior to Arkbro’s own. Among the most noteworthy organists currently working in the contemporary landscape of experimental sound, in addition to a small number of solo releases and an ongoing trio with Susana Santos Silva and Torbjörn Zetterberg, he worked extensively with Phill Niblock during the final years of his life.

Initially conceived by Lippard and Arkbro when both were in residence at La Becque in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, ‘How do I know if my cat likes me?’ is an existential meditation on the empty expanses of our automated everyday, self-described as “corporatized minimalism tinged with cool formalism, structured by the deft deployment of sonic and lyrical repetition”: attempting to untether sound from explicit meaning through cycles of repetition as a means to “satirizes the aesthetics of alienated life”. Recorded in part on the organs at Temple Saint-Théodule, across the album’s two sides Arkbro and Lindwall’s intertwining organ lines unfurl as total landscapes around Lippard’s vocal recitations of customer-service loops that shift from pure linguistic function to pure linguistic aesthetics. Drifting from “online banking” to “breathing down your neck banking” and “sexy, but bankrupt, banking,” the trio sketches a world of sadistic, deadpan banality, and the strange pleasure and meaning that can grow from within.

Comprising seven pieces in total, including noteworthy interpretations of Phil Harmonic’s classic 1978 composition ‘Timing’ - originally written for and performed by “Blue” Gene Tyranny - and Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers’ disco anthem, ‘At Last I Am Free,’ - famously reinterpreted by Robert Wyatt - as ‘How do I know if my cat likes me?’ rolls and ebbs, the trio of Lippard, Ellen Arkbro, and Hampus Lindwall thread a fascinating, strikingly contemporary path through the realms of musical minimalism, sound poetry, and conceptual art throughout which existential angst dissolves into hypnagogic detachment: a perfect depiction of the complex aural mirror for the techno-reality within which we all live, emote, and create through organic forms.

Beautiful, challenging, and guided by a wry, cutting humor that serves as a brilliant counterpoint to the seriousness of its subjects and the creative rigor that guided it into being, ‘How do I know if my cat likes me?’ leads the pack in a growing groundswell of contemporary sound poetics. Let’s hope it’s only the first of many outings to come from the trio of Hanne Lippard, Ellen Arkbro, and Hampus Lindwall.