i want to flag up a recent release by Danish composer Mads Emil Dreyer, featuring two works i previously encountered at the Dark Music Days festival in Iceland. More specifically, two works and two sibling works, as the four pieces included on his new album Disappearer comprise a pair each of Dreyer’s Forsvindere [Disappearances] and Vidder [Expanses] works.
My original account of Forsvindere 2, a work for the fantastical combination of celeste, vibraphone, glockenspiel, crotales and live electronics, described it as akin to “a live-action music box performing a clockwork lullaby”, and that’s precisely how it seems here. (Considering all four pieces are presented in live recordings, it’s possible this is the very same performance i heard in Reykjavik, by the ensemble NEKO3, with Dreyer himself on electronics). It inhabits a curious kind of almost stasis, in terms of pulse, harmony, melodic shape, its entire behaviour, yet early on Dreyer very occasionally undermines this with temporary tilts, not enough to skew things, as if the music itself needed a brief stretch before continuing. The title hints at the possibility of something uncertain, even unsettling, and the pristine stability of the piece becomes increasingly challenged by greater harmonic and textural complexity, which alongside some rhythmic irregularities, imply that, despite appearances, all may not be well. By the time the music box winds down and runs out of energy, we realise we’re some way from where we started – is it we who have disappeared?
Its predecessor, Forsvindere 1, uses the same instruments (again perormed by NEKO3 and Dreyer), here utilised to form another mechanism of sorts, but one with a much shorter periodicity, regularly slowing and pausing – with an implied series of quick key turns – before continuing. Its behaviour is less that of a near-stasis; instead, Dreyer starts challenging the texture, worrying it with chromaticisms, compounded by the increasing sense that these regular pauses are themselves something unsettling, as the music never quite seems the same when it restarts. Beyond this, as the piece continues there’s the uncanny impression of something else in there, a “force” glimpsed within the shimmer which may or may not be an aural illusion. Though Dreyer shows his hand earlier here than in Forsvindere 2 (where the shift away from comfort feels unexpected), it’s impossible not to hear Forsvindere 1 as the more disquieting of the two, with the relative stability achieved by the end bringing, if anything, the opposite of a sense of resolution. It’s not surprising that music with such an icy demeanour should cause one to shiver.
Vidder 1 is for bass flute (played by Lauren Wuerth) and electronics, and my first impression of it, following its 2020 première, was “like achingly slow breathing, but with each inhalation merging into the following exhalation, and vice versa, resulting in something like an instrumental circular breathing”. i also noted its peculiar harmonic state, sitting outside conventions of consonance and dissonance, and it’s this that, depending on your perspective, either disrupts the musical surface or gives life to it. Unfolding as an ambient steady state, its initial clarity is lost in waves of shimmer, judder and pulsation as tones caress or jar against each other. There’s a lovely sense of the music enriching, thickening and condensing as it continues, though despite the title, my impression is of an intimate intensity, as if i were immersed and suspended within a vibrating viscous fluid. The work’s ambient credentials are reinforced by its lack of an ending, drifting and vanishing before our ears.
There’s a slight shift in timbre for Vidder 4, the flute replaced with a reed organ (played by Fei Nie). This is by far the most tranquil music heard throughout Disappearer, the organ playing with simple, almost plain, diatonic arrangements of notes and chords. A third of the way through, following a pause, an arpeggio pattern is added and the tranquility continues. Compared to everything that’s gone before, this is disarmingly straightforward. However, at its mid-point, everything turns oblique, as if the music were abruptly blurred, ultimately continuing but now changed. A harmonic cloud starts to form around the arpeggios, and Dreyer nicely makes it ambiguous, possibly protective, possibly threatening. Maybe it’s neither, simply an agent of change, for the conclusion is a superimposition of these elements into a rich texture that finally seems to cohere into a unified totality, a complete, complex sonic object rotating ever slower in front of us, glimmering and vibrating with energy.
The interplay of simplicity and complexity in these four works is very nicely judged indeed, as is their balance of clarity and uncertainty. There’s something surprisingly dramatic about the way each piece rather nonchalantly plays out, never going where or being what we expected. That’s not to say it’s elusive; rather, this is music doing that most basic and quintessential of all musical actions: taking time to reveal its true self.
Released by DaCapo, Disappearer is available on vinyl and download.
