Festival Programme 2026 35% off with ultiMATE

Where Never

Beatrice Dillon & Explore Ensemble

Thursday 17 September, at 21:00–22:00

225–350 kr

Within the intimacy of the empty space

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 and performed at MUNCH by Dillon Explore Ensemble.

The title offers a clue. This is music that refuses to settle. 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.

Like Sandback’s lines of yarn, the music creates a space that seems both present and 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

Commissioned by Barbican, Rewire Festival, Ultima and MUNCH.

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 Ultima commission.
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.