Nightclouds [LP], Ellen Arkbro, Vinyl

On her fifth album, Ellen Arkbro brings her instincts for structurally elegant songwriting to extended improvisations. Her durational works move like water: They can be choppy on the surface, disturbed by harsh gusts of wind, or suspensefully still, belying the roiling forces deep below. Her towering organ chords billow and undulate, seeking internally discordant phrases and resolving them incrementally, slipping against one another with a luxuriant friction. While Arkbro's For Organ and Brass (2017) took a formalist approach, testing the mechanical limits of it's instruments, and Sounds While Waiting (2023) took a contextual one, offering up an explicit (if tongue-in-cheek) social-spatial function, Nightclouds is unabashedly Romantic and representational. Arkbro, steering directly into the storm, conjures the mortal awe of the sublime. LP