Hyunhye Seo - Eel

“From eel to eel,” Oskar thinks, standing by the coffin, “for eel thou art, to eel returnest.” - The Tin Drum, Günter Grass

Eel is the second set of sound works from Berlin based Korean American composer Hyunhye Seo. Known widely for her contributions to the now legendary unit Xiu Xiu, Seo’s solo pre-occupations dwell in an altogether more timbral and gestural domain. Each of the two pieces that compromise Eel are visceral deep dives into a turbulence of sound flows. Uniting her interests in ecstatic piano performance, dynamic percussion and cavernous acoustic treatments, Seo’s pieces are dense, instinctive and vertical. This is a music that skates at the edge of the abyss without fear of knowing what lies over the edge.

A Note From Hyunhye Seo

Every year, the eels arrive in Sargasso. The eels that sprang to life when the sun god Atum warmed the Nile, the eels generated within the entrails of the earth, from the rubbing of the rocks and dew drops on riverbanks, they travel thousands of kilometres to Sargasso to breed.

Their larvae, eels of glass, move to freshwater homes, crawling across land or up waterfalls if necessary, breathing through their skins, to get to where they want to go, although no one knows exactly where or why. Sometimes, they eat snakes and birds. After decades, when they're ready to breed, they stop eating and develop sex organs, and they travel back to Sargasso. If they can't go back to Sargasso, they never fully mature. They just stop ageing.

No human has seen eels breed. Freud dissected over 400 eels in search of eel testicles. Aristotle thought they grew from earthworms in dirt. No one knows why they go where they go, or how they find their way back.

Creatures of mud and rain, fluid in time and age, unabashed in its metamorphosis, unknown yet always found.