One of the more beguiling things to have entered my ears recently is Figure Pieces, a new 22-minute EP from Danish composer Mads Emil Dreyer. Two of Dreyer’s Forsvindere pieces were featured on his album Disappearer, released last year, and Figure Pieces demonstrates the same fascination with the permutational possibilities of percussion and electronics. i say permutational, yet one of the recurring questions that arises while listening to Figure Pieces is the extent to which there’s a process being carefully followed or whether its hypnotic patterns are the product of something more whimsical.
Figure Pieces comprises eight short movements, each of which proves surprisingly immersive despite its brevity. They act as windows into implied larger soundworlds, yet also seem to encapsulate everything that world contains. Macrocosmos and microcosmos simultaneously.
Another compelling facet is the blurring of where the live instruments end and the electronics – here in the form of sine tone keyboards – begin. #1 is a case in point, the shimmer of its singing bowl strikes plausibly real and also plausibly augmented. Though gently playful (melodically), it has a mesmerising rhythmic grounding redolent of gamelan music, tilting from side to side on its axis. #2 is similar, driven by a xylophone with loud chime notes often so high their overtone-riddled timbre makes the pitch beautifully complicated. There’s also a curious impression of both forward and circular progress. #3 appears to amalgamate these two pieces, yet now the blurring of acoustic and electronic is more emphatic, with the chime shimmer made to resonate with a vividness and unwavering sustain that feel uncanny.
#4 returns to small-scale, gentle, regular plinky patterns with halting xylophone notes, all of which are placed close to, but consistently off, the beat. Following a pause, it continues slightly enriched, the metallic resonance enhanced into a focused beam of shimmer that, again, could just as well emanate from repeated strikes or from sine tones. It’s one of several movements in Figure Pieces where Dreyer makes things wind down at the end, giving the music the impression of a music box running out of juice, in the process suggesting none of this is being performed but part of an elaborate mechanism. Its beauty is followed by a return of the loud, piercing chimes in #5, which ring out over a slow, low, regular xylophone. This highlights another recurring trait of Figure Pieces, the juxtaposition of twin elements, one regular, the other irregular. #6 picks up where it leaves off, the piercing pings again possibly-probably augmented by electronic tones, while a faster pulse chugs below.
This bifurcation between regular and irregular causes a particularly interesting reaction in #6. Elsewhere the two parts of each invention, though discrete, nonetheless seem connected, encouraging a broader kind of listening that embraces both. But in #6 i find my ear being pulled to one or the other, usually drawn to the ostensibly outside-time chime notes, with the regular pulse becoming a kind of wallpaper-like backdrop. Until the end, that is, when the pulse becomes briefly convoluted in a way that suggests inaccurate coordination but which surely isn’t.
#7 moves forward in a series of bursts, the xylophone mapping out what sounds like a regular pulse being continuously warped and flexed. As such, the lengthy chime notes – which elsewhere have clearly been the irregular element – here seem to be role-reversed, coming across as behaviourally regular in contrast to the continously wavering xylophone pulse. #8 brings Figure Pieces to a close with a lengthy synthesis of elements and ideas from earlier movements. Long metallic tones with even longer resonance shimmer over a sporadic xylophone, fixated on a single note. Pulse has vanished now; all that remains are archetypes and opposites: wet and dry, fluid and fixed, acoustic and electronic, phrase and full stop. Yet at over six minutes’ duration – by far the longest movement – Dreyer keeps the ambiguity going. The nature of the roaming tones changes, making the obsessive xylophone more and more a fixed point of reference. Listening more carefully reveals that the xylophone is in fact following a slow but strict pulse. This moment of clarity only makes everything more ambiguous, and leaves me wondering retrospectively about perceptions of regularity and irregularity, and whether any of them were entirely as they seemed.
Released last month by Don’t Look Back Records, Figure Pieces is available on download.
