Touch as Sound: Danniel Ribeiro’s palpability

Three solo improvisations from Bahia, 2023. ~24 minutes.

A note from Nyxphere: this isn’t one of our releases. It’s a record we love, by an artist we admire — exactly the kind of thing this blog exists to point at. Danniel Ribeiro is a friend and fellow traveler, and one whose next work is, in fact, coming to Nyxphere soon (more on that below). But palpability isn’t ours; it’s just a record we love — and that’s reason enough to write about it.

From the “III” video — sound rendered as water. Visuals by Eda Er.

palpability is a strange and lovely word for a record, and an exact one. It means the quality of being touchable — of being so present it could be felt with the hand. Across three improvised pieces, the Brazilian composer Danniel Ribeiro spends about twenty-four minutes chasing precisely that: sound you don’t so much hear as feel against the skin.

Ribeiro is from Bahia and based in California, where he completed his PhD in composition at UC Berkeley, working in contemporary and experimental music. palpability collects three studio recordings of solo improvised performances made in Bahia in the summer of 2023 — and it carries an unusual numbering. The tracks are titled “II,” “III,” and “IV.” There is no “I” on the album, because Part I lives elsewhere: the project began as a superimposed improvisation triptych on video, and what you’re hearing here is the work continuing past that first stage, into the studio and into solitude.

Danniel Ribeiro — prepared electric guitar and tabletop rig, live in Oakland, 2025.

Three improvisations

The album is short and asks to be taken whole. “II” (7:28) and “III” (7:08) are close cousins, and the closer, “IV” (9:37), is the longest and most expansive — the piece that lets the project breathe out. These are improvisations, but not in the busy, look-at-my-hands sense; they unfold slowly, texture first, as if Ribeiro is feeling around in the dark of a sound to find its edges. There’s a patience here that comes from trusting the material: a gesture is allowed to ring, decay, and leave a residue before the next one arrives. The recording is close and unhurried — performed, recorded, mixed, and mastered entirely by the artist — and that intimacy is the whole point. You’re near enough to feel the surfaces. The sound world is built from a prepared electric guitar — played as often with mallets and objects as with fingers — alongside a tabletop rig of strings and electronics, an instrumentarium that turns the guitar into something closer to a resonant surface than a six-string.

What makes it cohere is restraint. Nothing is rushed toward a climax; the drama is in micro-events — a swell that almost resolves, a tone that thickens and frays, a silence held a beat past comfort. It’s improvisation as close listening, the player as attentive as the listener.

Palpability, made visible — vibration becoming a physical fact.

Made tactile, on screen too

The version of “III” that circulated with a video makes the title literal in the most beautiful way. Instead of performance footage, the image is water: droplets striking a surface, rings expanding and colliding, light pooling in the troughs between ripples — sound rendered as something you could put your finger in. Palpability, made visible. (Full disclosure, since we mentioned the friendship: that video was put together on our end, by Eda Er.) It’s a fitting translation of music that is itself about texture and pressure, about the moment a vibration becomes a physical fact.

Why we’re pointing at it

There’s a quiet kinship between this record and a lot of what we care about at Nyxphere — improvisation treated as composition, sound approached as material rather than as a vehicle for notes, a comfort with patience and space. palpability doesn’t announce itself; it rewards leaning in. At five euros for the download and barely twenty-four minutes long, it’s an easy, low-stakes invitation into a sensibility worth knowing.

Put it on with headphones, somewhere quiet, and let the first ripple find you. Some music you analyze; this one you just touch.

Coming soon: Ribeiro’s dissertation composition — the large-scale work behind his Berkeley doctorate — will be released on Nyxphere. We’ll have much more to say when it lands.

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Listen: palpability by Danniel Ribeiro is out now (digital, 24-bit/48kHz; released March 19, 2024). Performed, recorded, mixed, and mastered by the artist.
Tracklist: II (7:28) · III (7:08) · IV (9:37).
More at dannielribeiro.com · Watch the project’s first stage (the superimposed improvisation triptych) on YouTube.

Written and published by Nyxphere — an artist-run label for genre-resistant sound, experimental music, and undefinable sonic worlds. Not a Nyxphere release; just one we love. “III” video by Eda Er.