There’s a striking image i vividly recall from when i first watched David Attenborough’s The Private Life of Plants. It featured time-lapse photography, focusing on a small, seemingly insignificant tendril lying on the ground. Through this simple act of televisual time dilation, we were able to cross the relativistic divide and enter into the plant’s reference frame. And as with physics, so with nature: things got weird. Suddenly, the ostensible passivity and inertia of the plant were dispelled in an unsettling display of activity, the tendril thrusting forward, very obviously feeling its way along, aware of its surroundings, twitching and twisting in response to both light and touch. Time-lapse techniques such as these occurred throughout the series, and more than anything else they made tangible the reality that plants are vibrant, living things, moving and interacting in ways we hadn’t hitherto appreciated.
i’ve been reminded of these images many times while listening to the music of Madli Marje Gildemann. Her work has for a long time been rooted – that seems entirely the right word – in aspects of organic life and biological processes. In the last few years, each time i’ve encountered her music in the concert hall the connection has been there: Dream Sequence of an Ancient Forest in 2019, Transpiration in 2022, Nocturnal Migrants in 2024, Dream Sequence of an Ancient Forest again and Feathered Mirrors in 2025 and, earlier this year, Osmosis, Photosynthesis and a second encounter with Feathered Mirrors.
All of these works, plus one more, are included on a new portrait album of Gildemann’s music. Dream Sequence of an Ancient Forest is an appropriate title, as it nicely encapsulates the overall listening experience, and in many ways all the pieces could be imagined as taking place in and around this particular habitat. i’ve written about all but one of these works previously, and the recurring impression i’ve tried to convey is of a particular form of texture music, often granular and / or tremulous, in which sounds are kept elusive, and allusive, always suggesting without becoming too concrete or definite. The album features all new recordings – mostly performed by Ludensemble conducted by Kaspar Mänd, who clearly have an affinity for this sort of music – and they reiterate this same impression, with greater clarity.
Take the Three Studies on Plant Biology, the first of which, Osmosis, starts out individuated, isolated even, as if each player were feeling their way forward like so many (perhaps time-lapsed) tendrils. Points of tangibility and connection are arrived at slowly, textural coherence slowly taking shape, and the work as a whole suggests a process of evolution from nascence to substance. The central study, Transpiration, is if anything more nebulous. Faint noises, tiny pitch traces, small plunks – mere possibilities of sound, let alone idea, but in due course there’s a sense of awakening. Sounds find themselves, start pushing outward, sustain, join; the gradual effect is really rather beautiful. But what follows, pulling back into a trembling form, is truly mesmerising. Gildemann uses register in such a way that it’s as if parts of the texture were separating, evaporating (highly appropriate in music titled Transpiration, though generally she approaches these processes in a non-literal, abstract way), polarising.
This use of the pitch spectrum is highly effective, all the more so as it then grows inward, becoming rich and registrally complex. The emphasis keeps shifting, like slow pulsing pitch strata, and the conclusion is lovely, combining emphases on register and articulation in a way that just about retains stability. It’s one of Gildemann’s finest creations, and certainly the highlight of this album. The short final part, Photosynthesis, is perhaps the most intangible of the three. i recently described it as having sounds that are “hard to parse, like trying to catch slivers of light”, and it’s all the more tantalising, and mysterious, since the music is slow. It avoids becoming anything even remotely defined, remaining a shivering, glistening music ever in flux, ending as breath.
Nocturnal Migrants shifts the focus of attention from plants to birds, though as much about the processes behind their migration as with their physical action. Here too, Gildemann maintains an abstract demeanour, ensuring the material remains just beyond our ability to resolve. Yet there’s a wonderful sequence that spontaneously arises a little over a couple of minutes in, when small-scale swells introduce gently tilting harmony. It’s beautiful, both restful and tense, the makings of something, both hint and herald. The texture does more than just shimmer; there’s turbulence within its energy, and it quietly roils. The players, fittingly, flock together into a single textural entity, in which sounds become somewhat divorced from their instruments, generalised into squeal, clunk, impact, sigh, song.
That vague harmonic tilt is clarified, focused, into a drone, but whereas drones often generate an impression of stasis, Gildemann makes it seem mobile, less like a tether, more like a shadow, as the music flies effortlessly along, fluttering, flickering, quivering – all wings and muscle, if we want to put flesh onto the music’s hypothetical bones. The atmosphere thickens, as does the texture, suggestive of greater speed, greater confidence too, a final swell being the catalyst for mass dissipation, separating in shining fragments of tone, prepared piano notes tumbling in space. Was that arrival? If so, it wasn’t quite the end of the journey, as Nocturnal Migrants concludes with an extra, energised surge, covered in high string scintillations. Gildemann won Estonia’s prestigious Au-tasu prize for this composition in 2024, and this recording makes it abundantly clear why, on that occasion, the jury got it right.
The title piece – Ürgmetsa ulm in its original, wonderfully concise Estonian – is a curious case. A work for two pianists and electronics, it’s performed here by Talvi Hunt and Kadri-Ann Sumera, for whom it was written, and it’s a piece that, after hearing it last year, left me feeling quite neutral and unimpressed. So it’s been good to spend time with it again, particularly as i’ve appreciated anew the extent to which Gildemann embraces highly unusual sonorities, but uses them in a surprisingly understated, even nonchalant way. As i’ve outlined here, her work is primarily concerned with intimations of action, with atmosphere, notions rather than ideas, and that takes its most concentrated form in Dream Sequence of an Ancient Forest. The pianists progress according to an inscrutable logic, emitting foghorn-like tones through small megaphones, in addition to less assertive calls, sighs, moans, breaths – often uncannily at a liminal point between vocal and synthetic – and enlivening things with bursts of energetic, muted clatter on the prepared sections of their instruments. Dreams lack logic, defy explanation, and one needs to let go of such thinking while immersed in this piece. If anything, it’s as close as Gildemann has drawn to ambient music, establishing as it does a very effective balance between energy and repose, foreground and background, outward and inward – and perhaps, by extension, ignorable and interesting.
Madli Marje Gildemann’s interest in unusual, incongruous sonorities is best exemplified here by the one work on the album that was new to me, AH-64 APACHE / Sumiseja, sumiseja… for a probably unique ensemble comprising overtone singer, throat singer, two violins, two double basses, percussion and piano. The first part of the title references the famous helicopter, and its presence feels like an immediate, massive intrusion into what has hitherto been a sonic space reserved for organic life, dreams and quiet natural processes. A man-made object, large, hard, metallic, created for purposes of destruction … how did it get here? Gildemann alludes to it through vocalisation and percussive effects, including a truly astonishing sequence five minutes in when the entire ensemble emulates the slow build-up of energy and sound as the rotors start up. It’s deeply disquieting to hear this level of energy and coordination after what has gone before; furthermore, the sound of helicopter pilots communicating is superimposed on the aftermath of this onslaught, the most concrete manifestation of anything so far on the album.
Yet the second part of the title, ‘sumiseja’, is an Estonian word meaning buzzing. In the soundscape that opens up after take-off, buzz can be felt in the drone underpinning everything (which, as earlier, suggests shadow beneath movement rather than something fixed and immobile) and in the remarkable abyssal throat singing that now resounds like some unearthly incantation, defying attempts to parse its emotion, aloof, implacable, immediate, bizarre and timeless. This is another polarised place, the depths answered above with high overtones and whistling. But the unfamiliarity remains critical, and while elements are recognisable from the other works we’ve heard, the helicopter is no modern-day bird engaged in intricately elegant processes that constitute its ‘life’. It’s an incursion of something dark and terrible, and the work’s denouement makes the ritualistic tone of the chthonic vocalise feel prophetic. The music is swamped, drowned, destroyed – all those traces of detail and filigree, those intimations of life and movement, all things natural, are wiped out in an enormous overload, a noise wall of blank, black obliteration. Not merely breathtaking, breath extinguishing.
This is a spectacular debut album from one of Estonia’s younger generation of composers, who is gradually gaining recognition both within her own nation and much further beyond. Released by Kairos, Dream Sequence of an Ancient Forest is available on CD and download.
