AREPO: Gaps & Time

Thursday, November 13, 2025
169 Bowery NYC
7:30 pm

Tickets

Program:

d. 60mins

According to the Hour – Harriet Steinke (2024)

Alice Down the Black Hole – Olive Køppe (2023)

to hold the sun in the palm of your hand – Arjan Singh (2024)

Portal – Ferdinand Schwarz (2022)

Additional Information:

to hold the sun in the palm of your hand by Arjan Singh

program note:

In January I was hiking in the hills near Berkeley when I met a magnificent tree positioned on an east-ward facing slope. This tree had 6 trunks emerging from its initial stem in a way that reminded me of fingers reaching up to grasp hold of something. As I came up to this tree, the sun was just about to set past the slope but had temporarily positioned itself perfectly in between the tree fingers, making it appear as if the tree hand was holding a small but bright ball of light. The sight was beautiful. The sun seemed so small in relation to this tree that had grabbed hold of it, but only for an instant. As long as it took me to admire how such an allignment flipped my of the marvelous heavenly body of the sun and the humble tree, one of many in a forest populated with millions, the sun had started to dip beyond the slope and only the memory of this experience remained. This piece is a tribute to those moments when forces beyond our reach naturally bring unattached elements from the periphery into focus, aligning them in a way that brings us new perspectives, and producing a temporary moment of clarity. –Arjan Singh

According to the Hour- Harriet Steinke

Written for AREPO as part of the 2024 Eighth Blackbird Creative Lab, this piece unfolds in sustained drone, with fragments of voice and interwoven melody. Its soundworld evokes the pull of midnight tides—patterns of waves rising and falling—while a slow, expansive melody emerges gradually from a single tone.

Alice Down the Black Hole: (O. Køppe)

Program Note

“Alice Down the Black Hole is an audiovisual work for 4 musicians and video. Based on clips from film versions of Alice in Wonderland from 1903-1915, this work presents a fantasy of Alice’s journey into a black hole. The music starts as a faint and airy shadow, but as the work progresses, the instruments emerge both individually and collectively. Sounds and lines are established, interrupted, stretched, bent and woven in and out of each other until Alice reaches the bottom – if there is a bottom.” (O. Køppe)

Portal- Ferdinand Schwarz
For four players and their voices, Portal is a cell-based work that cultivates constant interaction among performers while sustaining an intense, sculpturesque focus. The piece forms a swarm-like structure—not seeking forward progress, but instead revealing the full range of possibilities contained within the given material.

About the Artist

AREPO, [AH-reh-poh] made up of cellist and vocalist Elizabeth Kate (she/her), guitarist Marco Slaviero (he/him), accordionist Noël Rubli (he/him), and clarinetist Madara Eleonora Mežale (she/her) formed as a contemporary music group in 2022. Though conventional in number, AREPO embraces their unconventionality in quartet instrumentation as they believe disruption to the expected is vital for the future of music. By breaking standard instrumentation, using their voices, their bodies, and playing works by composers of marginalized communities, AREPO aims to set a new standard for what a 21st century quartet concert can entail.

Hailing from the USA, Italy, Switzerland, and Latvia respectively, each member carries with them a cultural and musical history that enriches the ensemble. Our name derives from the ancient and enigmatic Sator’s square: five-letter words forming a palindromic phrase in the figure of a square. AREPO is the second word of the square and is a hapax in Latin literature, i.e., it does not appear in any other writing apart from this figure. It is a rare word with an aura of mystery, a malleable and multiform word. AREPO is a unique name that encapsulates infinite meanings; of this multitude, it forms its own identity.