I’ve written a few entries where I’ve known little about the artist and indeed even their musical output in these here pages, such as Shmu and Ziggurath. I like to intentionally do this from time to time as it puts me in a position where I’m not leaning on any backstory or knowledge of an artist too much, letting the music speak for itself from my own impressions really. For those familiar with the artists, there may be important points of an artist’s story I’m missing or more acknowledged musical points of reference, but in the end all of us at some point are first time listeners to any piece of musical work that we come across in our lives.
For this entry, looking into the first release For Organ And Bells and its title track by Swedish musician/composer Ellen Arkbro, I actually had been listening to her music passively for a while as I had acquired a digital copy of that 2017 album within the last year after including her work on an ambient playlist I had put together while promoting the Ostrofti album Split Infinitives, but only recently had given the four tracks off that release a more detailed listen and then in turn honed in to find out a bit more about this artist. Any references that I’m about to lay down here are solely from my point of reference, and perhaps not ones that listeners more cued up with current activities in what might be called the electro-acoustic or modern classical scenes might anchor Arkbro‘s music to.
A surprising amount of music I listen to falls under the low-level listening or ambient genre umbrellas — mood music if you will. I listen to a lot of this type of music at night and when I’m in bed ready to clock out for another day. Many artists in this realm that I listen to tend to be of the electronic variety, creating their vast soundscapes on any given range of synthesizers and dizzying studio effects. I think what made this release and its title track really stick out for me is that Arkbro doesn’t use these tools really at all to create her compositions. As the title suggests, Arkbro‘s début album is solely comprised of brass instruments — namely trombone, tuba, “horn” and microtonal tuba — along with an antiquated renaissance organ from the 17th century.
Along with this less frequently used selection of instruments, the recordings of these themselves are pretty much as they sound without the added reverb and delays that any given number of “ambient” composers would jump to in their tool kit.
The title track “For Organ And Brass” features all of these instruments, starting out with long notes on both the organ and one of the brass instruments. To me there’s a slight phasing effect in how these instruments interact which adds a cool sonic texture. The piece, at a meditative 20 minutes in length, sees the group of musicians shift to different chordal structures in unison and holding those notes for at least a few bars. While not completely venturing into what I might hear as pure micropolyphony, each chord set by the ensemble has some interesting, tight, minor key tonal clusters, often with the instruments at times just one full tone apart from one another. If anything the quality of the music in this piece lies in the power of simplicity.
Various pieces online that summarize this album put forth relative comparisons to some of the work of New York City musician Arthur Russell — a prolific musician who had worked with many forward-thinking artists in the 70s and 80s (Talking Heads and poet Allen Ginsberg to name a couple) and sadly passed away in the early 1990s due to AIDs-related complications. I have listened to many tracks from his 1986 album World Of Echo over the years, many of which simply feature cello and his tender and gorgeous voice (“Lucky Cloud” itself a beautiful piece on its own with clip below). The comparisons to Arkbro and Russell centre around Russell’s 1983 instrumental album — one I wasn’t really familiar with — entitled Tower Of Meaning which is instrumental and aligned more with contemporary classical music (clip below).
Listening to the compared material of these two artists, my mind immediately drifted to a composer I was quite familiar with and that by way of his work in film (my point of entry to this type of music can very often be through film soundtracks), and that being the English composer Michael Nyman. Much of his work is familiar to a broader audience though his frequent film soundtrack compositions with Walthamstow-born artist and film director Peter Greenaway — a favourite director of mine, whose work has been covered in this website as well. In particular, a version of Nyman‘s piece “Endgame”, with a different original version in Greenaway‘s 1988 film Drowning By Numbers, came to mind with its similar long-phrase, solemn brass minimalism as used in a somewhat emotional and sensual scene from one of Greenaway‘s most popular (and one of the hardest ones to watch due to the crassness and brutality of the film’s main antagonist, played brilliantly by the late Michael Gambon) films, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), of which there’s clip of this scene below with version of “Endgame” that I’m referring to.
And with that I thought of the second album by “world music by way of post-punk” duo Dead Can Dance entitled Spleen And Ideal — a favourite of mine as it still has echoes of their fully post-punk self-titled début before they transistioned into a full-on world music influenced sound in their later albums. If anything Spleen And Ideal has more of a medieval quality unlike the other albums, and the tracks on this album that do feature horns — most notably the second track, “Ascension” (see clip below) — have this similar somber, slow moving feel to them. I should note here I love the cover of this album, with its out-of-focus mystic figure holding up a star to some crumbling building placed in focus in the background — it’s not a castle actually, but rather something more of the time the album was released, which in this case was a building titled Grain Elevator No. 2 at Salford Quays, part of Manchester and Salford Docks, captured beautifully in mid-demolition.
A final connection I personally made with Arkbro’s music was the 90s output of an American chamber ensemble called Rachel’s, founded by the now passed away Louisville musician Jason Noble, who transitioned to this project — one of several — after his tenure as guitarist in the seminal, cult post-hardcore, “noise rock” band Rodan. (another post-Rodan group, June Of 44, is in fact the first entry I wrote for Track Of The Day). Rachel’s 1996 album The Sea And The Bells I listened to many times when I first moved to Vancouver. It has a cinematic haunting quality that definitely takes the listener on a journey, with the album itself being based on a collection of poetry with the same name by Chilean poet and diplomat, Pablo Neruda. I’ve included the track “The Voyage Of Camille” below which joins up well with all of the tracks I’ve grouped together here.
So those are my impressions written out before they slipped away from me. There’s some supplementary clips below relating to Ellen Arkbro, including a somewhat recent interview feature in her home/studio and Stockholm as well as a longer feature documenting rehearsals in Brussels, Belgium from 2022 for those that might want to investigate her process further.