Nightsongs, Daysongs: New York, night one
Nightsongs, Daysongs: New York, night one
Photo by Kali Malone.
Dia Chelsea
New York, NY 10011
Nightsongs, Daysongs is a sonic portrait of composer and musician Ellen Arkbro, who will perform selections from her recent albums and present the US premieres of new compositions commissioned for her collaborators.
Night one features selections from Arkbro’s 2025 albums Nightclouds (for solo organ) and How do I know if my cat likes me? (with Hanne Lippard and Hampus Lindwall), as well as Arkbro’s composition Clouds (for three tubas), performed by Microtub (Robin Hayward, Martin Taxt, and Peder Simonsen).
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Ellen Arkbro (b. 1990) is a composer, musician, and sound artist working with precision-tuned intervallic harmony. Arkbro composes for acoustic instruments, synthetic sounds, and combinations of the two. Through her concise musical vocabulary and formal architecture, Arkbro evokes a sense of emotional ambivalence, guiding the listener through a spectrum of feeling with a cool and distant beauty. Despite her works’ scale and precision, the result is rarely a dry exercise in process; Arkbro draws from a vivid array of musical vocabularies—namely, her studies with La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Jung Hee Choi, and Marc Sabat; jazz and blues scales and pop modalities; electroacoustic music and sound synthesis; and her time in Catherine Christer Hennix’s Kamigaku Ensemble. In all aspects of her practice, Arkbro focuses on the qualities of harmonic sound that reveal listening as an active process of creative participation, inviting the listener to gradually transform into the sound itself. Her recent solo release for Blank Forms Editions and La Becque Editions, Nightclouds, stands as a profound statement in Arkbro’s evolving body of work, at once introspective and expansive. The album reaffirms her singular ability to transform harmonic simplicity into deeply affecting sonic landscapes, inviting listeners into a space of contemplation and emotional depth.
Earlier this year, Hanne Lippard, Ellen Arkbro, and Hampus Lindwall released their debut album: How do I know if my cat likes me?. Throughout, Arkbro and Lindwall’s ascetic organ accompaniment provides a tonal landscape that is both intuitive and enigmatic, while Lippard’s recitation ensnares the listener in a tautological customer-service loop where language shifts from pure function to pure aesthetic. By untethering sound from meaning through a pleasurably numbing cycle of repetition, the album satirizes the stultifying aesthetics of alienated life—from hold music to online banking—with a prim, deadpan delivery. Recalling David Rosenboom and Jacqueline Humbert’s Daytime Viewing (1979–80), How do I know if my cat likes me? pokes at the porous membrane between sound and meaning, poetry and song, or playful irreverence and existentialism. Lippard, Arkbro, and Lindwall’s creation is a portal into a fantastical, unforgettable, organic-synthetic world.
Formed in 2010, Microtub are a trio composed of Robin Hayward on microtonal F-tuba and Peder Simonsen and Martin Taxt on microtonal C-tubas. Praised for their “fluttering beat patterns and rich, velvety sonorities,” Microtub deploys such carefully calibrated harmonies that their sound resembles a single synthetic, panoramic force rather than three separate instruments. The textural, sculptural chords are only revealed as such when the tubas diverge decisively into their own dark tones. Since their founding, Microtub have released six albums and performed at myriad international festivals including Ultima in Oslo, Sonic Acts in Amsterdam, CTM and MaerzMusik in Berlin, Wien Modern, FIMAV in Victoriaville, and Intonal in Malmö. Clouds (for three tubas) was commissioned by and premiered at Intonal 2022. As Arkbro puts it, the static, minimal characteristics of this work demand an extremely physical mode of playing from the tuba players. For the audience to encounter a piece of music that slows time impossibly, seeping gradually through perfectly balanced chord progressions, the tuba players need to be constantly recalibrating their breathwork and valve positioning.
Nightsongs, Daysongs is made possible by generous support from Art Music Denmark, the Consulate General of Sweden in New York, the Howard Gilman Foundation, mediaThe foundation inc., Music Norway, the Royal Norwegian Consulate General in New York, and the Swedish Arts Grants Committee. This program is additionally supported by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Please note that RSVP does not guarantee entry. Free Blank Forms events are first come, first served.
Dia Art Foundation was established in 1974 with the mission to serve as a conduit for artists to realize ambitious new projects uncurbed by the limitations of more traditional museums and galleries. Dia’s programming fosters contemplative and sustained consideration of a single artist’s body of work, and its collection is distinguished by the deep and longstanding relationships that the nonprofit has cultivated with artists whose work came to prominence particularly in the 1960s and ’70s. In addition to Dia Beacon, Dia Bridgehampton, and Dia Chelsea, Dia maintains and operates a constellation of commissions, long-term installations, and site-specific projects, notably focused on Land art, nationally and internationally.
