ARTIST STATEMENT Abigail Toll is a sound artist composing slowly evolving, mathematically tuned drones that explore cosmic acoustics, trance-states and interspecies resonance. Since 2018, she has translated these inquiries into archival research, field research, texts and hypnotic soundworks spanning solo and chamber ensemble performances, sculptural installations, presentations and articles. Toll's second solo album, IDOL (Superpang, 2025), nominated for the German Record Critics' Prize 2025, draws on the cosmological and acoustic properties of Malta's 5,000-year-old Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum — a temple engineered to produce altered states of consciousness through sound and astronomical alignment. Composed with tuned water glasses, woodwind, strings and synthesizers, the album's shimmering drones have been described by press as "a temple of sound" (Anxious Magazine) and "a clue to human perception" (Coeval Magazine). Toll collaborated with multimedia artist Anton Filatov on an accompanying multichannel sound and sculptural exhibition, Lick the Walls to Understand Echoes, expanding on IDOL's themes during their residency at HOLON Berlin (2025), a platform commissioning site-specific work intersecting art, music and emerging technologies.

Cosmological and ecological themes also run through her parallel interspecies field and archival research project, Where Words Fail. The project observes the acoustic ecology of mountain communities during transhumance — the seasonal migration of herds between valley and mountain — and stems from Toll's encounter with a bell-wearing flock of sheep, whose sound she found to activate a neural response enabling interspecies exchange beyond words, echoing Judith Becker's concept in Deep Listeners of a trance state offering "a new kind of experiencing and knowing of the phenomenal world."

Toll's methodology contributes to an ongoing discourse in experimental music concerned with perception and cosmology. This autumn she presents her field research at the "Harvesting Otherwise" conference (Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna) and the tekhnē symposium (Trafo, Szczecin). Her composition exploring deep space travel, part of The Afterimage Series, premiers at the ZKM | Hertzlab residency, Karlsruhe on 10 December 2026. Other 2026 residencies include field research supported by the Goethe Institute in Serra da Estrela, Portugal, and music production at EMS Stockholm. Earlier residencies include production at Amplify Berlin under Caterina Barbieri (2018) and archival research at tekhnē, GMEA, Albi (2024).

Toll's debut studio album, Matrices of Vision (Shelter Press, 2023), explores AI data bias through mathematical tuning and composition. Commissioned as an ensemble piece by KW Institute for Contemporary Art, it was performed at the Klosterruine in Berlin by Rebecca Lane, Lucy Railton and Evelyn Saylor. 

Her music has featured on BBC Late Junction, and her work has been presented internationally at venues including KW Institute of Contemporary Art (Germany), Ferdinandeum, Tyrolean State Museum, (Austria), The Royal College of Music Stockholm (Sweden), Suoni per il Popolo Festival (Montreal), Liste (Basel), Kunsthal Gent (Belgium), Kontejner (Croatia), The Horse Hospital (UK), Pawilon (Poland), and Volksbühne (Germany), among others. 

Toll holds an MA in Electroacoustic Composition from KMH–Royal College of Music, Stockholm, and has received numerous scholarships including Initiative Musik, the Royal Music Academy Stipendium, KodaKultur, Carl Erik Levins Stiftelse, the Goethe Institute and Berlin Music Commission.










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