Ellen Arkbro - Sounds while waiting (2021)

These recordings are traces of something I have come to love to do in large resonant spaces, which is to set up sustained chords on multiple organs, and then to move slowly through the sound. The instruments are usually far apart, which makes for the emergence of large fields of continuous change, spaces of harmonicity that can be passed through layer by layer, and which contains within them points of both clarity and of overwhelming complexity. The organ pipes are tuned and retuned, though sometimes I leave them just as they are. The moment I’m after is when a particular kind of sounding texturality is revealed – it is rough, focused and yet strangely transparent. Recording these kind of sounds is a complicated matter, and some of the rich spatial qualities are naturally lost when collapsed in this way. My hope, however, is that some of it survives in translation. More than anything, these recordings are documents of the activity. The process is very much ongoing, and it’s something I hope to continue exploring for many years to come.