Festival Programme 2026 35% off with ultiMATE

Where Never

Beatrice Dillon & Explore Ensemble

Thursday 17 September, at 21:00–22:00

225–350 kr

Music that refuses to settle. Beatrice Dillon and Explore Ensemble premiere Where Never at MUNCH.

A length of yarn traces the outline of a form: a square, a circle, an oval. Inside, nothing. No cement, no monument. The sculptor Fred Sandback created works that defined space without filling it. His yarn installations inspired Beatrice Dillon's Where Never, written for the Explore Ensemble. Dillon herself joins them on stage.

Fragments circle and interrupt one another, textures cut across each other mid-motion, and the whole seems to hover on the verge of coming apart. What holds it together are sounds emerging and evolving, suspended within an otherwise empty space. The electronics settle like a shadow, giving the emptiness depth.

Like Sandback's lines of yarn, the music creates an intimate space, present and yet elusive, held together by the relationships between its parts rather than by any centre of gravity.

Programme

Beatrice Dillon Seven Reorganisations (2024) for ensemble

Beatrice Dillon Where Never (2026) for ensemble and electronics

Want to know more?

Beatrice Dillon has produced Bendik Giske's most recent album, and has performed at Øya, connecting her practice to the Norwegian scene before this new work, commissioned by Ultima, Rewire and the Barbican.
Philosopher Nishida Kitarō used the word basho to describe a place defined not by what it contains but by how relations take shape within it. Dillon’s music inhabits a similar territory. Sounds arrive with uncanny precision — near, then distant; fragile, yet exact. "A diaphanous completeness," she calls it.
The concert also includes Seven Reorganisations, a work that grew from Dillon's collaboration with the London-based sextet Explore Ensemble. It is her first entirely acoustic work.