Chloë Sobek is a composer-performer from Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Her practice explores how musical expression emerges from entanglement with the more-than-human, positioning instrumental performance as both aesthetic and critical inquiry. This concern also informs her ongoing research into the concept of musical ‘hyperreality’. Working primarily with the Renaissance violone, Sobek treats the instrument as a site of material resistance and historical continuity. 

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Her work spans disparate forms, from acoustemology to Noise music, situating these within experimental composition and employing collage as a compositional and performative method. Through the layering of 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’; foregrounding labour, friction and rupture. 

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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, premiered at Ukaria as part of the Chamber Landscapes series, 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 band, 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, the Ian Potter Cultural Trust and was a double bass scholarship student at the Australian National Academy of Music and the Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School.