Stephen O’MALLEY
“Avaeken”

American experimental composer Stephen O’Malley releases ‘Avaeken’, two sides of immense, immersive, self-annihilating music via Dais Records. 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 now 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.