So much of Zosha Warpeha’s music feels like more than the sum of its parts. The palette may be minimalist – her voice and the Hardanger d’amore, a 10-string fiddle with five sympathetic strings – but these pieces carry the weight of stories accumulated across time. I grow accustomed to the dark, her newest album, is a haunted meditation on how sound can reveal what sight cannot. Warpeha explores the ways room resonance has a life of its own, and the secret worlds that breathe within its space. The music has a tactile quality, as if moving across the surface of skin while it drones and cascades through slow unfoldings and purposeful, drawn-out melodies. Each piece has its own gravity while still feeling interconnected, like separate moons orbiting a larger sonic mass. Her refined technique emerges from a practice steeped in reverence, in understanding and inhabiting the sacred.
I grow accustomed to the dark will be released this Friday, March 27, by Outside Time. Pre-order HERE.
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What are some of your earliest sound memories? Before you picked up any instrument, what sounds caught your attention or stayed with you?
I don’t consciously remember this one, but I wore bangles with bells on my feet from the time I was born, like many good Thai babies. It’s a way of keeping track of a child while also bringing good fortune, but it also becomes part of a baby’s sound environment. I probably thought I was being really sneaky sometimes, when in reality, everyone knew exactly where I was. Other early sounds – the sizzle of stir-fry on the stove, honeybees buzzing in the field, the sound of a drill boring into a maple tree and echoing through the woods.
When did you first encounter the Hardanger fiddle, and what drew you to it? Was there a specific moment when you knew this was the instrument you needed to work with?
I came across the Hardanger fiddle in a recording of Nils Økland several years ago and was so struck by its tone – something felt so raw, of the earth, of the air. There was a certain breath in Nils’s playing that I had been searching for as a violinist and improviser. It was months of listening to his music before I finally had the chance to try one. Immediately, everything that I had been trying to do on the violin finally worked, and I just knew that I needed to find one of my own.
Visiting the Emanuel Vigeland Museum sounds like a transformative experience. Can you describe what it felt like to play in that space for the first time? How did those twelve seconds of reverb change your relationship to the instrument?
It was absolutely transformative – I still dream of making a record in that space someday. I think that the experience really showed me what having a conversation with my instrument could be like, and how it was to breathe between phrases, with or without enormous reverb.
Are there specific techniques or tonalities from Norwegian folk tradition that you can hear in this album, or has it become so internalized that it’s just part of how you play now?
Honestly, I think it’s pretty internalized at this point! I actually think this album gets pretty far away from the tradition and idiomatic technique, though I’m not listening with fresh ears anymore. But there are many parts of my playing that I’ve come to through being immersed in the tradition. On this album, I’m using a pretty strange tuning, but if you listen to each set of adjacent strings, you’ll hear interval relationships that come up in traditional Hardanger fiddle tunings. It’s like each string acts as a pivot point into another tuning and modality. Certain embellishments in my left hand are also coming out of folk music – these are absolutely integrated into my playing now in an unconscious way. And the bow that I use on the recording is a copy of a really old, rustic type of Hardanger fiddle bow with a dramatic curve, reminiscent of early Baroque bows. Though I probably use a much lower tension in my bow hair than would have been used to play dance music, because I love the airy-ness that comes out of playing with loose hair.
The album title for I grow accustomed to the dark comes from an Emily Dickinson poem. What drew you to that particular phrase, and how does it connect to the music or your creative process?
I swear, the name of this album is not as angsty as it might seem. In choosing a name, I was actually thinking a lot about dilation. When you sit for long enough in a dark room, your eyes start to adjust to reveal more details in the shadows. I’ve realized recently that the music I’m making is a lot like that. To really take it in both as a listener and performer, the development over a long period of time is really important. Over time, more details emerge, but not necessarily because of the growing complexity of the music or anything. I think it’s sort of an exercise in calibration – our ears get used to one thing, and then a slight change in density or intonation can have such a big impact.
You developed a unique tuning system specifically to interact with ISSUE Project Room. How does that work? Are you tuning to the room’s resonant frequencies, or is it something else entirely?
Yeah, pretty much! And I’m not too scientific about this process – no spectrograms or anything, just intuition. I spent a lot of time playing in the room to find the frequencies that were most active, which would respond the strongest when I offered a bowed or sung pitch. I had the idea that I could turn the room into another set of sympathetic strings for the fiddle, by reverse-engineering the tuning (while I would normally tune sympathetic strings to reflect the bowed strings, I had to tune the bowed strings to reflect the room). Once I found the core tone of the room itself, I started experimenting with the intervals and overtones around it to find the best match between instrument, room, and my own playing style.
How much of these pieces was composed before you entered the space versus what emerged in response to the room itself during those single-take performances?
All of the material emerged through many hours in the room itself, exploring different sonic spaces. In my composition and improvisation practice, I tend to create sound worlds that correspond with various tunings. So even in an improvised performance, I’m revisiting places in those worlds that I’ve been before – but maybe viewing a scene through a different lens or taking a different path, sometimes finding a hidden door to an entirely new landscape. That being said, after the first take, I said to myself, “OK, I guess I’ll try another one like that,” and that pretty much became the form for the rest of the session, with some scenic detours here and there.
Can you explain what a Hardanger d’amore is for people unfamiliar with the instrument? How does it differ from a standard Hardanger fiddle?
Well, let’s start with the standard Hardanger fiddle – it looks like a highly decorated violin with four bowed strings, but then has a set of four or five sympathetic strings that run through the neck. That’s the simplest way to understand it, but there are many other things that separate it from a violin; shorter scale length, a much flatter bridge and fingerboard, often unwound or loosely wound gut strings. The Hardanger d’amore, a modern hybrid between a Hardanger fiddle and viola d’amore, has a larger body, longer scale length, and an extra bowed string; five bowed and five sympathetic total. I also opt for modern wound orchestral gut strings, though I do love playing on traditional gut.
Both pieces (“filament” and “visual purple”) have titles that evoke light rather than sound. Why those particular titles, and how do you think about the relationship between sound and light in your work?
Titles are always the hardest thing for me! It took me a very long time to settle on those track names, and they came out of a nerdy word-dump of everything that was connected to the idea of dilation, the theme that I was reflecting on when choosing the album title. Filament is obviously connected to the image of a light bulb; more specifically, in my mind, I see the metallic glow of the wire, sometimes gentle and sometimes piercing, but always persistent. It felt connected to the high metallic drone that appears throughout that track. Visual purple is the colloquial term for rhodopsin, basically the protein in our eyes that allows us to see in dark environments.
It’s funny that you ask about the relationship of sound and light – for many years, I have insisted that I am not a visual listener. I don’t see colors or images when I listen to most music, and especially not my own. Maybe this is one of the reasons that titling is so difficult for me. But light is different – light is connected to shadow, reflection & refraction, opacity, warmth, which are all elements present in my playing. I see the relationship of light and dark akin to the relationship of sound and silence, and as I dig deeper into resonance and spatial performance, these relationships are called further to the forefront of my work.
Both pieces are single-take performances. What does that constraint do for the music? Is there something about the unedited, real-time nature of it that matters to the work?
I wanted to make an album that truly felt like my performance practice – long-form, durational, and immersive. I’ve considered editing together shorter takes or creating an album that flows non-stop from track to track in a curated way, but it doesn’t quite have the same continuity of energy that a longer take does. I feel time in such a different way when I’m playing this music from beginning to end, and I really think that my own mental state as a performer shifts as a result. Each performance is also a process of discovery, and it’s really important to me to share that with the listener.
The word “devotional” comes up in the description. Does that resonate with you? Is there something ritualistic or spiritual in the process of making this music?
A good friend of mine described the album as “devotional” when I asked them to listen shortly after recording the album. I had never thought about it that way, but it really resonated with me. I think that there is a devotion in my practice to sound, touch, my instrument, the space I’m in. I also lean into repetition as a way of sinking deeper into sonic spaces, almost like repeating a mantra, meditational at times. I wouldn’t say that there’s anything inherently spiritual in my music or process, but there’s also an intangibility in it. A lot of things are guided entirely by intuition, or seem to emerge from something larger than myself – generational knowledge, memories passed down through tradition, the whisper of an old room.
And, to close as always… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
Oh wow, too many. The coo of a mourning dove, wind through brittle leaves, the bubble of a moka pot. The absolute silence of the Boundary Waters.
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