Stephen O’Malley’s Avaeken turns a tree name into 42 minutes of sustained tones

Stephen O’Malley’s Avaeken is a 42-minute composition in two tracked parts, released through Dais Records. He wrote it for Zwerm, the Belgian electric guitar quartet, and it first accompanied Banks Violette’s exhibition ‘Wish You Were Here’ at TICK TACK, a brutalist hall in Antwerp. The title comes from a thousand-year-old tree on the Swedish island of Fårö. The release describes the music more plainly than that: long sustained tones, microtonal adjustments made with e-bows and slides.

The scale is the record’s strongest 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)’. The titles point at a session, a room, a quartet, a running clock. The microtonal detail is the whole vocabulary, and it is patient enough to earn the runtime.

What works against Avaeken is the same exactness. A commission built for one room can read as an exhibit label once it lands in your speakers. The titles are archival, and they never say whether the take you hear is the better one. For a record so concerned with permanence, that is an odd wobble, and an honest one.

O’Malley’s composition assumes your attention. 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 might be a document of an event you missed, but as a record it is a clean, heavy object, one that respects the tree it is named after.

You will not put this on to feel better. You will put it on to sit still.

The tracklist

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