Ellen Arkbro: Change Now

The Swedish composer and organist in conversation

Ellen Arkbro is a pioneer of the new wave of drone-inspired pipe organists which started around a decade ago. But while other young female organ players kept successfully working that niche, it seemed as if Arkbro wanted to break out of it as soon as she’d created it.

The Stockholm native, who originally trained as a jazz singer, has a degree in electroacoustic music composition and learned from greats like La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Jung Hee Choi, Marc Sabat and Catherine Christer Hennix. She’s long since become one of the most interesting, versatile and explorative artists on the global experimental music circuit herself.

Today, Ellen Arkbro celebrates the release of two new albums on Blank Forms Editions, the label of the New York-based non-profit organization:

• Nightclouds is a collection of playful, jazz-inspired improvised solo organ works, recorded over the course of two years.

• How do I know if my cat likes me? is a brilliant trio record with performance artist/spoken word poet Hanne Lippard and fellow organist Hampus Lindwall, recalling 1970s avant-garde works by “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Paul DeMarinis and Robert Ashley.

I caught up with the 34-year old composer via Zoom to talk about her pop-punk roots, a mild existential crisis she’s currently going through and, of course, the genesis of those two new recordings.

photo: Marcus Pal

Ellen, what are some of your earliest memories of sound?

The first thing I come to think of is the demo song on a small synthesizer that I got from my dad when I was four or so, Yamaha PSS-280. For some time I didn’t know how to play it, but I would press play to listen to the demo song. I was so into that song – I’d play it on repeat and dance in my dad’s living room.

What kind of music did your parents play at home?

My dad was always listening to music, mostly pop and post-punk. A lot of Postcard records. And he was really into Prefab Sprout. I don’t know how many times I heard Andromeda Heights. But yes, I was constantly listening to and discovering music through him. And my mom was the one who made sure that I started playing instruments and singing in choirs.

So you did get musical training quite early on then?

Yes, I have always been playing music for as long as I can remember. I started out taking piano lessons and singing in choir. When I grew up we spent a lot of time in church and that played a big part in my musical upbringing. They had a rehearsal space in the basement of the church where they offered what they called “rock school” and someone would show you how to play Beatles songs. So that’s where I started my first band when I was about ten years old. We played until I was about 16. I loved that band. It was my life. And I did believe that we would take over the world.

Was it as serious for your fellow band members too?

Not in that way, no. I believe it was more a way of hanging out for most of them. We were rehearsing two times a week but I wanted to play everyday. The drummer would forget her fills and the bass player often forgot her lines and I would show them over and over how to play the songs.

What kind of music did you play?

At that point, being 12 or so, we were heavily influenced by early 2000s MTV pop punk. Bands like Blink-182 and Good Charlotte.

How did you get into jazz then?

That was a sudden shift. When I was 15, I started a high school that had a program for people who aspired to be professional musicians and within the first week it became very clear that jazz was the thing. So, I went to the library and borrowed all the jazz CDs I could find and started listening to Coltrane and Miles and started exploring how to listen to this music. And that I had a huge crush on a jazz drummer, also really helped.

You actually studied to become a jazz singer, right? Who were some of your biggest inspirations?

Ella Fitzgerald was the one. And Billie Holiday. And a Swedish singer called Monica Zetterlund who made a record with Bill Evans [Waltz for Debby, Verve 1964]. She was certainly a huge inspiration.

But eventually, you dropped out of jazz school.

Yes, it was inevitable. I love that music and have a real connection to it. But going to jazz school the focus was mostly on scales and chords and harmony and you get no real context for this music or where it came from. It eventually felt a bit empty and I couldn’t really see a way forward and that’s what made me take a different road, which I'm now happy I did.

photo: Victoria Loeb

After playing in a pop-punk band and training to become a jazz singer, you changed courses once again.

Yes. I dropped out of jazz school and was kind of depressed for some time. I wanted to be with music somehow but it took some time to figure out how. At that point it was difficult to see what was ahead. Somehow, I understood it had to do with composing music. Then I started experimenting with sound, in a similar way that I started out with my band when I was nine: What happens if you plug this in here, and a microphone to the guitar pedal… and I had a turntable that I was experimenting with.

Somehow you ended up at the Royal College of Music, studying electroacoustic composition.

Yes. I found out about the courses at the Elektronmusikstudion [EMS in Stockholm], so I started going there and learning about synthesizers. And it was fascinating to have studied music for such a long time and suddenly hearing about a different 20th century European music history that I had never heard of.

Who were some of the most inspiring figures in terms of composers, when you started going down that path?

I remember the first time I heard Éliane Radigue’s music. I was in my dad's kitchen. A lot of formative things happened in my dad's apartment in Stockholm – that's also where I composed some of my best pieces. Anyway I was sitting in the kitchen, and they played the whole Trilogie de la Mort on the Swedish radio and I was completely stunned, the sound was mesmerizing. That was an important moment. And after that, La Monte Young and that 1960s minimalist scene in New York.

The influence of Éliane Radigue and La Monte Young comes through in your long-duration pieces focusing on microtonal, incremental shifts. I wonder why this type of slow music for deep listening has been connecting with more people over the last decade – surely it can’t just be the pandemic, even if that played a role. Do you have any thoughts on that?

I think it stands in contrast to how most people experience life these days. There’s just so much input all the time, and here's something that’s timeless, and sort of stands completely outside of that. I’m guessing that a lot of people feel disconnected from a spirituality, like, where's the soul, you know? And here's some sound that points to another way of experiencing time and space. But from my perspective, these days there's music that really does change your perception of space and time and then there’s music that is more pointing towards a music that does that, but made into a format that is sellable, you know?

It seems clear which side you’ve chosen.

I'm interested in the experience of sound as an embodied spatial experience – sustained sound that you can move around in, that exists in some sort of parallel world to ours and points to another sense of time.

But something that has influenced me heavily is spending time with La Monte and Marian [Zazeela] and Catherine Christer Hennix, and see how they lived their lives. So different from how most people live their lives. They did somehow have their own sense of time – they've created their own worlds to live in, and the work becomes inseparable from their life and their philosophies, everything.

Is that something you aspire to do yourself?

I wish. I think I'm too much of a 90’s kid. For me, there’s a lot of tension in relating so strongly to La Monte’s and Catherine’s music and wanting to make work that is somehow connected to their work. Like, how do I present this kind of music and experience in a 45 minute concert in a festival program, you know? There’s a clash there already, which I can really feel. Sometimes I'm wondering if I should give up on that rigidity and just make some beautiful sounds? And in ways I have been moving in that direction with Nightclouds. But then, something always pulls me back to the one sustained in-tune chord. It has so much gravity for me. I'm still figuring it out. I'm having somewhat of an existential and artistic crisis and I'm really asking myself all the questions: What is sound? What is music? Who am I? How are you supposed to live your life? And I don't know, I'm still searching…

photo: Kali Malone

You’ve been doing this for a while now. Your first organ piece came out in 2017. At the time, young organists were coming out left and right – it was Sarah Davachi and you, then Kali Malone and Maria W Horn. What was actually going on there?

(laughs) I knew of Sarah Davachi’s music. But the beginning of it for me was hearing a organ piece by my friend Isak Edberg that he had composed for the meantone organ in the German Church in Stockholm. So I wanted to write music to be played on that organ and composed For Organ and Brass, in my dad’s kitchen, and it was performed in 2014. I’d met Kali in New York a couple of years before, and she had moved to Stockholm – we lived together for some time. I know she has told me that she was really inspired after hearing that concert and she started writing music for organ and interning for an organ tuner. Kali, Maria and I were studying together and had a group called Hästköttskandalen, together with Marta Forsberg and Elsa Bergman.

What does that mean?

Horse meat scandal. It was a thing that happened in Sweden around the time that we started playing together [in early 2013]. The scandal was that a lot of readymade food that was said to contain beef in reality contained horse meat and people were horrified by the idea of eating a cute horse. You could read about it everywhere and Kali was learning Swedish at the time and picked up this word… (laughs)

But it was a very formative thing to play together. Kali and I were playing guitars, Marta Forsberg played violin, Elsa Bergman played double bass, and Maria was creating feedback with projectors and cameras. We put out a record and played quite a few shows. But ultimately the group had too many strong artistic personalities. We all knew what we wanted to do, and it was slightly different things. It got a bit impossible when everyone wanted to shape it differently, and I believe I definitely had a tendency to take over and try to orchestrate everyone and everything.

You're all successful solo composers now, so that says a lot.

(laughs) Yes. But it would still be a lot of fun to get back together at some point and see what would happen now.

Since those days, you’ve released very different works, including a vocal album. Your new solo LP, Nightclouds, is a collection of organ works recorded over the course of two years. Could you speak on the inspirations behind it, and the thread running through these recordings?

The first thing that comes to mind is an organ concert with Charlemagne Palestine. We shared a bill in Malmö some years ago. I was really in awe of his way of playing the organ. I remember being fascinated by how it was so playful but at the same time felt so clear, you know? I’ve been longing to find a way to improvise more and be more playful. And come back to playing music in a sense, rather than designing sound sculptures. I am still exploring harmony in a somewhat rigid way, but I also want to feel like I’m playing music, if that makes sense… In the last couple of years, I've listened to a lot of Allan Holdsworth and Meshuggah. I don’t know if those references make sense for anyone else but I can hear it in the music.

Meshuggah? I mean, there are no actual rhythmic elements on your album…

(laughs) No, maybe there’s not so much Meshuggah in this music, but definitely Allan Holdsworth.

When you improvised on the organ, did you have a loose structure of chords written down beforehand as a framework?

Not really. But it’s also not like I sit down and put my fingers down – it’s more like finding some harmonies and then improvising a form around that. So starting out there’s often some harmonic idea but the form of the pieces is often more or less improvised.

You’re releasing another album on the same day, How do I know if my cat likes me?, a trio record with Hanne Lippard on vocals and Hampus Lindwall on second organ. This one felt very different and unexpectedly enjoyable to me. How did it come together?

I met Hanne when we were both in residency at La Becque in Switzerland. We had both worked together with Hampus before, when Hampus and Cory Arcangel commissioned pieces for organ from both Hanne and myself to be performed as part of Art Night London in 2019. Hampus and I had been talking about performing a version of Phil Harmonic and “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s “Timing” on two organs and that’s how the trio formed.

“Timing” is mostly sustained organ chords, but a voice appears at seemingly random intervals, asserting to “change now”, and then the organ plays a different chord. I wondered how those intervals were determined?

In a way I question why we recorded and put out a version of this piece, because the original version is honestly perfect. But you know, sometimes you just love something so much that you want to play it yourself. The piece came about when Phil Harmonic was asked by “Blue” Gene Tyranny to compose a piece for keyboard. And Phil responded: “Well, I don't know if I can, because I am not comfortable telling other people what to do.” He felt that telling people what to play was ‘authoritarian’ behaviour. So “Blue” Gene Tyranny suggested, “Why don't you just convey some of your timings?” So as far as I understand it, “Blue” Gene Tyranny composed or improvised the harmonies, and Phil Harmonic instructed him when to switch to the next chord. And in our version we kept the timings that you can hear on the original recording.

“The Long Goodbye” is another stand-out to me. It sounds like a Zoom call where people keep saying things that normally lead to an end of the conversation, but they never actually do.

For me that's the saddest song on the record. The inspiration came from a Youtube video I saw of two ChatGPT’s ending a conversation, but since they’re programmed to always have the last word, they get stuck in this loop that goes on and on. So we sort of riffed on that idea. There's something so touching and heartbreaking about it. The conversation doesn't lead anywhere, and there's somehow a wish to connect but it's so very disconnected.

What I love about the record is that it’s not built on any clear narrative, and it’s not imposing something on me.

Yes. It really is just about the sounds. I am not so into narratives. I recently read an interview that I did about ten years ago where I am saying something about removing storytelling... I thought that was kind of cool. I had sort of forgotten about that. (laughs)

What are some of your immediate plans for the future for when you get to the other end of that current existential crisis?

Well, luckily things are still happening while being in this existential crisis. (laughs) I'm currently working on music for a crumhorn consort, a quartet of crumhorns in London. It’s a renaissance double reed instrument that sounds almost like a kazoo or a warmly shaped sawtooth wave. The music is definitely connected to the Chords album, exploring similar sounds and modulations. I'm also writing a piece for a viola da gamba trio that will be premiered at Biennale Musica in October, and I'm still working on the tuba album that I have been working on for some time.

photo: Kali Malone

Out now on Blank Forms Editions

• Ellen Arkbro – Nightclouds

• Lippard Arkbro Lindwall – How do I know if my cat likes me?