Bells Echo – iiiinteriiiim – 15. Mai 2026 – frohfroh – electronic music from leipzig

A new edition of the wonderful Bells Echo series is coming out in May. This time in a new location and with two exciting musicians between organ and antique flute.

As is well known, Leipzig has had a series, Bells Echo, for a little over ten years, which does not simply set concerts in rooms, but rather allows the chosen rooms to be thought through. They are mostly churches and monuments, places with patina, volume and a life of their own. Places that do not transport sounds neutrally, but break them, charge them, extend them. For the next edition on May 15th, Bells Echo is moving to the Evangelical Reformed Church on Tröndlinring for the first time. So a new location. And one that should prove to be pretty ideal for what has characterized this series since 2015: concentrated music between drone, experiment, minimalism and a sacred appearance in a direct dialogue with architecture and history and their reverberations.

It seems almost logical that Ellen Arkbro is a guest this time. Kali Malone, a musician from Scandinavia, was already featured at Bells Echo in April 2025, and now the Swedish composer and sound artist is another artist who draws her strength from slowness, precision and spatial depth. Arkbro works with just intonation, i.e. with finely balanced, pure moods, with long sustained tones, minimal shifts and harmonies. All of this can be experienced more as a physical state than as a classical composition. Their music is reduced, but never empty. Clearly built, but full of movement in the details. Anyone who knows her work for organ, brass or electronic setups knows that she is not concerned with superficial drama, but rather with resonance – in the room, in the ear, in the body. This is precisely why this music develops its effect particularly where architecture does not remain a mere shell. At Bells Echo she will present her album “Nightclouds”, which will be released in 2024, live.

With Lukas De Clerck, Arkbro has a second artist at its side whose work takes a completely different approach and yet fits surprisingly well into this setting. The Belgian musician and researcher works on the aulos, an ancient double-reed instrument that has been thought to have disappeared for many centuries. However, de Clerck did not turn this into a museum reconstruction project, but rather developed a lively, contemporary practice. His latest album “Telescopic Aulos of Atlas” sounds archaic and futuristic at the same time, raw and precise, physical and strangely distant. It's about breath, friction, microtonality, overtones that begin to shimmer in the room. A music that doesn't impose itself, but sticks.

The new location should contribute a lot to this. The Evangelical Reformed Church was built at the end of the 19th century in the Neo-Renaissance style and brings exactly the mixture of austerity, calm and spatial presence that is so crucial to Bell's echo. The building on Tröndlinring appears clearly structured, erect and concentrated. There is no cluttered sacred space behind it, but a place with its own axis, with attitude, with acoustic depth. Its history – from its construction around 1900 through the destruction of the Second World War to its simplified reconstruction – is also inscribed in this atmosphere.

That's exactly where Bell's Echo continues to stand out in Leipzig. The series doesn’t just curate exciting names. She finds constellations. Between artists and places. Between sound and architecture. Between contemplation and intensity. The edition with Ellen Arkbro and Lukas De Clerck promises to be a particularly harmonious example of this.