Emily Dickinson's poem is about the eye: the pupil widening until a dark road becomes walkable. Zosha Warpeha borrows its first line for her second solo album and hands the idea to the ear. The two pieces on I grow accustomed to the dark run to about twenty minutes each, and for the first few minutes very little happens. A drone, a breath of voice, a trill that flickers and goes out. Stay with it and the room fills in, the way a bedroom does after the light goes off.
Warpeha was born in 1994 in Milaca, Minnesota, and came to New York to study jazz at The New School. The records of the Norwegian fiddler Nils Økland pulled her toward the hardingfele, and a Fulbright took her to Oslo in 2019; she stayed for a master's in Nordic folk music at the Norwegian Academy of Music. She now plays the Hardanger d'amore, a modern relative of the folk fiddle with five bowed strings and five sympathetic ones under the bridge that ring with whatever is played above them. The tradition's ornaments are still audible in her phrasing; the dance pulse the hardingfele was built for has been let go.
The first resonant room she ever played was the Emanuel Vigeland Museum in Oslo, a frescoed mausoleum where a note hangs for about twelve seconds before it dies, and it has shaped how she works with rooms since. For this record the room is ISSUE Project Room's theater in Brooklyn, where she was a 2025 artist in residence. She built a tuning system for the fiddle that interacts with the theater's own resonance, so the venue becomes one more bank of sympathetic strings. Both tracks were recorded there in March 2025 in single takes; the album came out on the Washington, DC label Outside Time on 27 March 2026.
The titles point at light. A filament is the thread that glows inside a bulb; visual purple is the old name for rhodopsin, the pigment that lets the retina work at night. Long bowed tones sit in the room like beams, the ornamental turns of Norwegian fiddling become sparks at the edges, and her voice, without words, runs so close to the strings that the two often blur into a single tone. Where her 2024 debut silver dawn, on Relative Pitch, kept thirteen short pieces near the cadences of the tradition, this one loosens the structures until any hall she walks into can reshape them.
Orbweaver, her duo record with Mariel Terán and her Andean flutes, appeared on the same label in 2025, but the solo records make the argument clearest: a fiddle built to make people dance can, in the right room and with enough patience, be an instrument for seeing in the dark.
