Stephen O’Malley - Avaeken Stephen O’Malley

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 through 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 at Muziekcentrum De Bijloke, a 13th-century former hospital with modern acoustics in Ghent.

O’Malley’s connection to Violette began in 2005, when they met in a cab and quickly became immersed in 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.”