Chloë Sobek is an Australian violone (Renaissance double bass) player, composer and improviser based in Berlin. Her practice centres on ‘disappearance’ as its conceptual frame, approaching it as a material and perceptual condition through which original sources, the once-living, lost histories and sounding bodies persist as traces. From this perspective, her work explores how musical expression emerges through entanglement with the more-than-human, positioning instrumental performance as a form of aesthetic and critical inquiry. Her ongoing research into ‘musical hyperreality’ extends this concern to how an original expression can disappear through repeated reproduction and simulation. Working primarily with the Renaissance violone, Sobek treats the instrument as a site of material resistance and historical continuity: a sounding body through which traces of the past are reactivated in the present.

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Her work spans disparate forms, from acoustemology to Noise music, situating these within experimental composition. Across these forms, disappearance is traced through the remnants and residues that remain. Layering archival fragments, environmental sound, improvisation and extended string techniques, Sobek combines maximalist intensity with an attention to material thresholds, pushing sound and instrument toward points of ‘breakage’ where presence begins to fracture, recede and persist as trace.

She has been described as an artist “thinking deeply about how to aestheticise what’s on everyone’s mind; to use art to drive engagement with ideas whilst pushing the boundaries of technique and technicality” — Kieran Ruffles, 4ZZZ.

 

Sobek holds a PhD in creative music practice from Monash University, where her doctoral research examined the corporeal resonance and philosophical possibilities of the violone within contemporary sound worlds. Her thesis also critiqued inherited musical traditions through more-than-human perspectives and Australian scholar Tyson Yunkaporta’s theorisations of relationality and Indigenous knowledge systems.

 

Recent projects include Recercada (2025) for violone and tape, commissioned by David Harrington (Kronos Quartet) for the 2025 Adelaide Festival and Uppon-La-Mi-Re (2025) for violone and viola d’amore, a collaboration with Garth Knox (Arditti Quartet), also commissioned by Harrington for the same series. Her work The Flesh of the World (2024), for violone and tape, premiered at MPavilion and was later presented for Room40 at The Substation supporting experimental rock group, Xiu Xiu. 

 

Sobek has presented, performed and recorded internationally, with recent activity in Reykjavík, Athens, Mexico City, New York City, Los Angeles and Berlin. She has presented research at TENOR24 in Zurich and NIME23 in Mexico City and recorded with Relative Pitch Records in New York. Her debut album Apotropaic (2023) was released to critical acclaim, followed by Burning Up (2024), a collaboration with renowned saxophonist Tim Berne.

 

Sobek has received a number of awards including the Allan Zavod Performers’ Award, the Monash Jazz and Improvisation Postgraduate Award, the Marten Bequest Scholarship and the RMIT Vice-Chancellor’s List Award. She has also received support from organisations including the Seaborn, Broughton & Walford Foundation, Creative Australia, the City of Melbourne and the Ian Potter Cultural Trust.