ALBUM REVIEW · STEPHEN O’MALLEY
Stephen O’Malley’s Avaeken turns a tree name into 42 minutes of sustained tones
Stephen O’Malley’s Avaeken was built for a Belgian guitar quartet and a brutalist Antwerp exhibition. On record it runs 42 minutes, two sustained movements, and asks you to stay still.
BY JOLT STAFF · AUG 21 2026 ·
3.5/5 · GOOD — THE JOLT VERDICT: Monumental, patient, and too reverent to fully land.
Stephen O’Malley’s Avaeken is a 42-minute longform composition, split into two tracked parts, released through Dais Records. It was written for the Belgian electric guitar quartet Zwerm and first accompanied Banks Violette’s exhibition ‘Wish You Were Here’ at TICK TACK, a brutalist hall in Antwerp. The title belongs to a thousand-year-old tree on the Swedish island of Fårö. That is a heavy frame. The music, as the release describes it, is sharper: long sustained tones, microtonal adjustments made with e-bows and slides.
The scale is the record’s best argument. Two movements, each just past 21 minutes, with nowhere to hide and no verse to catch you. The first track is called ‘21:13 (take 4)’; the second is ‘21:30 (take 1 comp)’. Those names do real work. They point at a session, a room, a quartet, a running clock. The microtonal detail is not ornament. It is the entire vocabulary, and that vocabulary is patient enough to earn the runtime.
What works against Avaeken is the same exactness. A location-specific commission can read as an exhibit label when it is moved into your speakers. The track titles are archival. They point at a process, not a final statement, and the album never tells you whether the take you are hearing is the better one. For a work so concerned with permanence, that is an odd wobble. It is also honest.
O’Malley’s composition does not beg for your attention; it assumes it. That assumption will lose some listeners in the middle, but the piece is short enough to forgive. At 42 minutes it is almost exactly the length of a serious exhibition visit, and it has the same shape: you enter, you adjust, you leave with residue. Avaeken may be a document of an event you missed. As a record, it is still a clean, heavy object, one that respects the tree it is named after.
It will not be the record you put on to feel better. It is the record you put on to sit still.
The tracklist
- 21:13 (take 4) — 21:12
- 21:30 (take 1 comp) — 21:29