Photo by: Iris Delafortry
American experimental composer Stephen O’Malley announces Avaeken, two sides of immense, immersive, self-annihilating music. The record preserves site-specific work: O’Malley installed Avaeken as part of Wish You Were Here, the exhibition by renowned American artist Banks Violette, underscoring the tension between presence and absence, life and loss.
O’Malley and Violette have developed a distinct language of sound, space, and sculpture over the past two decades, reverberating the walls of world-class institutions from The Guggenheim and Centre Pompidou to prominent galleries such as Maureen Paley in London, Gladstone Gallery in NYC, and Antwerp’s TICK TACK, the brutalist space where Wish You Were Here unfolded in early 2026.
Emerging as an LP, Avaeken presents power and phenomena: low-frequency vibrations, deep oscillations, and phase cancellations that translate as innately effective in any environment. Violette’s visual expression — the impossibility of locating yourself within the loss of a friend and the broader decay of culture — now fills the LP sleeve and feels inextricable from O’Malley’s sound, both still without resolution.
The origins of Avaeken date back to 2020, when O’Malley was commissioned by the ZWERM electric guitar quartet of Belgium. He rendered the piece, naming it after the millennium-plus-old oak tree on Sweden’s island of Fårö, for four guitarists on standard electric guitars, sustaining microtonal harmony produced with ebows and slides. “Natural harmonic tone coloured by the valves of the amplification is the one desired characteristic,” reads the initial notes. “At first I asked, why would I write for another guitar player?” he says. “I realized how amazing it is to be a listener on the other side of the music; together we were able to try all these precisions with intonation, harmonics, specific microtonal ideas.” The quartet performed Avaeken several times before O’Malley joined them for a recording session in Muziekcentrum De Bijloke, a 13th-century former hospital with modern acoustics in Gent.
O’Malley’s connection to Violette began in 2005 when they met in a cab and quickly wrapped into each other’s craft, leading to their first collaboration later that year. “I asked him if he’d have any interest, and that was really the spark of it all,” says Violette, whose pioneering work delves into the darker aspects of human existence, drawing from subcultural aesthetics like death metal, punk, and goth. “It was just like, hey, this is what I’m interested in. And it turns out, you’re also interested in it. And now after 20-plus years, we still seem to find something to talk about, which is enormously gratifying.” When Violette told O’Malley about the vision for Wish You Were Here, the unreleased Avaeken recordings immediately came to mind. “They felt conceptually linked, using beating and physical waves,” O’Malley explains. “I asked what do you think of these pieces? And Banks responded very positively. He didn’t question what the instrumentation was…it was about sound and the phenomena of what the sound was doing.”
After playing the recordings loudly in his truck, Violette likened the sensation to a vacuum. O’Malley continues, “Phase cancellation occurs when several sources go out of phase; there is an actual drop in energy. The sound energy is eating itself, the waveforms are canceling each other out.” The uncanny listening experience spoke precisely to what Violette had envisioned for Wish You Were Here: a feeling of unending loss, continuity without reconciliation, and the persistence of structures after meaning has dissolved. The work is anchored in the moment of Steven Parrino’s death on New Year’s Eve 2005.
Avaeken functioned in stereo across the three levels of the glass-cube-like TICK TACK, which Violette treated as structural conditions, encouraging movement between floors that featured a smashed, burning disco ball and an illuminated sign reading “The End,” as a looped video played as a solitary ghost in the basement. That sense of displacement was already present in the music, which gives Avaeken an unusual potency now, in life after the installation, as the focal point, paired with Violette’s art across the LP sleeve. It is fitting to press this composition — a moment in time, that served another moment in time, seemingly in perpetuity — to vinyl as a means of recognition and preservation, be it ever at odds with the sound’s effect. Just as nothingness was the presence at Wish You Were Here, Avaeken continues on as something else, or perhaps, nothing else, for the ears of the beholder. Indeed, how amazing it is to be the listener.
Pre-order Avaeken here ahead of its August 21 street date. More soon…
