Stephen O’Malley

Residency report
Peter Rehberg, one of my nearest & longest collaborators, dies a few days before entering the residency. As a result, amongst the duty and repercussions, the entire period of the residency is coloured deeply. The summer becomes a practice in stillness, contemplation, staring into the void & the spontaneous emergence of the glorious study of colour & light every single moment of every day, over the lake, the stones, the water. Meditations.

The most critical & creative aspect of my residency is that I shared it with Kali Malone, my companion, my guest & my inspiration.

Together we organise so much music, including a pipe organ concert at Saint François in Lausanne within three weeks of arriving, & enter the Eglise Tour-de-Peilz & work with the spectacular unique organ. Numerous recordings of Kali’s compositions. Write and record at LB, for Charwei Tsai, and dumbtype & Sakamoto. Guests & collaborators make music at LB together: Lucy Railton, Anthony Pateras, François Bonnet, Leila Boudreuil, Frederikke Hoffmeier, Cindy van Acker. Other guests without music & a lot of cooking & wine, Karl Sjölund, Mariana Fehrer, Jordana Loeb, Elodie Lesourd, Benjamin Banciatto, and Ian Christe. Hiking all around the area. Concerts & travel fiercely return in the autumn. Remorse of not being at LB all the time vs actuality that travel & concerts are at the core of my practice. I had to get there again post-pandemic. LB becomes a place of solace, rest & thought for the music. Worked at Cinema Bellevaux on spatialisation production & Kali visited an organ castle in Lausanne, considered a concert series there.

Curated a series of concerts at Cave12 with Kamilya Jubran, François Bonnet, Youmna Saba, Fujiiiita, Kali & myself. Composed music for Eklekto & Alexander Babel, & for Kali & I to work with Cindy Van Acker. The project inched forward during my time there, evaporating into dust after the powerful first working session (& public rehearsal) at ADC early March 2022. — Stephen O’Malley

Biography
Stephen O’Malley is a founding member of the group SUNN O))).

Wildly prolific, O’Malley’s oeuvre is defined by its remarkable breadth, complexity and multidisciplinary interests. It includes collaborations with a wide range of experimental musicians and composers, including Scott Walker, Jim O’Rourke, Keiji Haino, Thurston Moore, Attila Csihar, Peter Rehberg, choreographer Gisèle Vienne, the authors Dennis Cooper & Alan Moore,composers Iancu Dumitrescu, Johann Johannson, Alvin Lucier, artists Banks Violette, Fujiko Nakaya, Emily Ding & arts collective KLAT (led by Jerome Massard), performance artist Nico Vascellari, filmmakers Gast Bouschet and Nadine Hilbert, Jim Jarmusch and Panos Cosmatos, designer Rick Owens, IRCAM, INA-GRM (Paris), EMS (Stockholm) and others.

O’Malley is also a vigorous live performer and has toured around the world since 2003. His live performances feature a reverberating fog of electric guitar minimalism – sorcery that challenges boundaries of space and time.