The harp – one of the oldest string instruments – has always, to me, been closely tied to the floating threshold between sleep and wakefulness. Its quiet paving between night and day became even more palpable when Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore brought the ancient instrument to life at DR Concert Hall’s Studio 2. Lattimore’s harp playing and Barwick’s ethereal vocals inhabit a space somewhere between modern ambient and classical nocturne – like an anachronistic lullaby infused with synthesizers and drenched in reverb.

Most of the concert’s pieces were drawn from Barwick and Lattimore’s recent album Tragic Magic (2026), recorded over ten days in a basement beneath the Philharmonie de Paris, with free access to its collection of antique instruments. Both 1970s synthesizers and 18th-century harps are awakened on the album. And although Barwick noted with a smile that the old harp from 1740 unfortunately could not join them that evening, it was clear to feel the two American musicians’ passion for the span between the antique and the contemporary. This tension was most evident in their story about the first rainfall following the devastating wildfires in their hometown of Los Angeles. A field recording of that very rain introduced their subsequent cover of Vangelis’ »Rachel’s Dream« from the Blade Runner (1982) soundtrack, casting the all-consuming fires in a dark science fiction glow. Yet Barwick’s cinematic whistling and Lattimore’s harp arpeggios still found a glimmer of light within the dystopian darkness. Though both musicians have long-standing solo careers behind them, one can only hope this will not be the last we hear of their collaboration.

Electronic duo Vanessa Amara are riding a wave of success at the moment. Last year, their caustic take on Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s organ music earned them credits on Rosalía’s much-hyped Duolingo album LUX, and this summer Birk Gjerlufsen and Sebastián Santillana – both former volunteers at Koncertkirken – will appear at Roskilde Festival.

But on Thursday night at Christianshavns Beboerhus, they were overshadowed by RMC alumnus Harald Bjørn, who opened under the alias Soli City. He too placed a classical instrument, the cello, at the centre of his electronic music, and his masterstroke was to make it shimmer like a beautiful, lost memory amid a restless abundance of chopped-up hyperpop aesthetics and melancholic spoken-word poetry.

The cello, played on electric keyboard, was synthetic yet human: an intentionally sloppy fragment that set the tone for half an hour of dissolution. Even when Soli City reached for life with an urgent handclap beat in a vast sonic space, it was staged like a chance pause during a flickering radio scan, while relaxed piano chords sustained an ambient sadness. Impressive.

It was refreshing when Vanessa Amara followed with a different, ecstatic take on the atomised information society. At their best – and they were at their best in the beginning – the duo combined, with Kanye West-inspired genre agnosticism, distorted pop samples and polytonal church organ until the 21st century seemed ready to come apart at the seams. It was sublime, simply put.

But instead of delving deeper into the forces they unleashed, the duo quickly moved between tracks and veered far too early into dull, therapeutic deep house, a mode they never left again. We barely had time to lose our footing before we were handed a group hug – and frankly, I’d rather do without.

With Kammerkonzert, British electronic composer Tom Jenkinson, better known as Squarepusher, places himself within the braindance tradition of the 1990s and 2000s, when electronic artists flirted with classical music – from Aphex Twin’s collaborations with Philip Glass to Venetian Snares’ Rossz Csillag Alatt Született, where baroque patterns were folded into mechanical rhythms and the melancholy of strings torn apart by breakbeats.

Squarepusher is no stranger to the acoustic: his hyperactive bass guitar – often sounding as if in flight from its own virtuosity – has been central to his music since Music Is Rotted One Note (1998). Here, too, it takes a leading role. On »K2 Central«, a looped, faintly anxious bass figure drives the music forward while strings swell in and shift its harmonic function. The effect is not without merit, but the execution is strikingly conventional. The MIDI-generated strings move in neat chord blocks with an almost overly reverent sense of decorum. The classical tradition is not challenged but merely cited, and the arrangements are so polished that the orchestra’s presence feels barely justified.

The compositions also hover awkwardly between the slick functionality of elevator jazz and something exaggerated, almost circus-like, as if unable to decide whether they want to be serious or ironic – and end up being neither. »K4 Fairlands« stands out by pairing string quartet with the busy breakbeats that are Squarepusher’s trademark. Here, a friction emerges between the rigid and the fluid that briefly opens the album up, suggesting how two otherwise incompatible systems might coexist.

Overall, Kammerkonzert comes across as artistically cautious, marked by a peculiar restraint. What remains is the sense of something only half realised. One wishes Squarepusher had either ventured further into the orchestral realm or trusted more in what he actually excels at, giving the electronics freer rein. Preferably both.