Jasmine Morris / Ellen Arkbro

So-ōn fuses field recordings and found sounds with live instrumental material, processed and reconstituted through experimental digital techniques. The piece draws on the early twentieth-century Japanese aesthetic project Sō-on no naka kara umareru kōjō ongaku (Factory music born from noise), which emerged during the Second World War. The unprecedented noise of the new machinery led to the surreal enforcement of female workers singing operas composed specifically to distract themselves from the sound of the machinery. Responding to this dissonant historical moment, So-ōn stages a tension between imposed sonic order and mechanical excess, with performer negotiating and reconfiguring the soundscape in real time. The electronic component includes field recordings and transformed fragments of the quartet’s own playing, creating a recursive sonic ecology that evolves with each performance. Rather than a fixed composition, So-ōn functions as a shifting system. The result is a layered reflection on noise as both a historical snapshot and a compositional soundscape.

The gravity of Ellen Arkbro’s music is in the chord changes, not only in the harmonic changes but also in the deliberate timing of their unfolding. With a unique sense of form, her harmonic progressions give rise to ephemeral architectures, like clouds drifting across the sky. Her music brings the listener’s attention to the delicate rawness of the in-tune sound and harmony as texturality. Nightsong is a new composition for a three-piece bass viol consort. The piece can be thought of as a drawn out chord progression, continuously modulating harmonically in just intonation, mournfully highlighting the passing of time. The players are intimately involved with the tuning of each chord, striving for harmonic clarity, sounding and listening as one.