STEPHEN O'MALLEY - Avaeken

Used as the soundtrack for Banks Violette's installation "Wish You Were Here", the work by Stephen O'Malley addresses themes of loss and absence. Amplified, among other places, within the brutalist spaces of TICK TACK in Antwerp, it was tasked not only with underscoring the exhibition's drama, but also with physically translating the feelings of disorientation and solitude that follow the loss of a loved one.
The exhibition unfolded across three floors; the first two, visible from outside through the large windows, displayed a huge "The End" sign and a mirror ball that had crashed to the ground and been set alight (the image used for the album cover). In the basement, further wreckage of chandeliers, flightcases, illuminated metal structures and metres of snaking cables rendered the sentimental apocalypse of grief as though it were the video for "Obstacle 1" by Interpol.

With an excess of didacticism, let's add the work's distant origins. Created in 2020 for the Belgian electric guitar quartet ZWERM, it was recorded in a converted medieval hospital and named after an oak tree that has lived for a thousand years on the island of Fårö — the island where Ingmar Bergman retreated and languished for decades. Only Banks Violette's involvement kept the project from remaining a commission confined to a single cycle of performances.
This enormous historical backdrop led us to listen to "Avaeken", a dense sonic concretion of slide and ebow, slighter than the violent monoliths of Sunn O))) and more human than the organ-like solemnity of "Spheres Collapser". A living body that aches and gives way and is stripped to the bone until it annihilates itself. Through the heavy use of phase cancellation, the long vibrations and insistent beating pulse into nothingness in an estranging process of perpetual, repeated decay. In an uncertain atmosphere, the long drones arise with the sole purpose of returning to silence, stirring a certain dismay in the listener. The delicate shaping of frequencies creates fleeting shadows, sensory artefacts in which each listener's imagination discerns the shape of aching memories.

A composition that becomes a simulacrum of loss, a cold white desert in which the listener is confined alongside their own disorientation and a certain crystalline melancholy. O'Malley, intimate and inspired, proves at ease with electric guitars and the complex physics of sound. A solid, self-contained, deeply felt work, capable of engaging listeners even outside the exhibition spaces where it was originally confined.

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03/10/2026