Rune Glerup
15
Addictive Elegance
Rune Glerup: »Perhaps Thus the End«
A string quartet consists of four players, and a clarinet quintet five, though the Danish composer Rune Glerup (b. 1981)’s newly recorded works for both ensembles would have you believe their ranks are vastly undercounted. The recipient of last year’s Nordic Council Music Prize for his violin concerto Om lys og lethed (About Light and Lightness), Glerup writes pieces for chamber and orchestra that are often characterized by their multidimensionality: a sonic idea will persistently recur in altered guises, for a sense that one is feeling around different facets of a physical form. Yet the two works on Perhaps Thus the End – brought to life by the impeccable Quatour Diotima and clarinetist Jonas Frølund – are just as potent a demonstration of expansive interiority as they are of surface area.
In the titular string quartet, whose seven movements are named for lines from Beckett’s late prose work Stirrings Still, long tones and galloping motives are seamlessly shuffled amongst the ensemble, generating such a sonority that the group seems to have doubled in size. The language is sometimes mechanical but never automatic, bending rather into balletic shapes. Glerup is a careful manager of texture, finding grace in unintuitive sounds through skillful layering – to speak merely of how, in a later movement, a harmonic pizzicato punctuates the string equivalent of vocal fry before the group pivots suddenly into stillness.
On the unexpectedly addictive »Still Leaning Towards this Machine«, which is surely among the few times a contemporary clarinet quintet has received that distinction, electronics magnify the ensemble through a subtle stuttering resonance. As a result, across three spunky movements, the group is occasionally transmuted into a sort of paranormal accordion. It’s a wonderfully weird effect that, just as weirdly, the score seems to deliver with a straight face – just one more satisfying surprise among many others on this excellent record.
© Niklas Ottander
»Music is a deep, but not serious, spiritual practice, in which creator, collaborator, and consumer alike are their own personal pope.«
James Black (b. 1990) is a composer, performer, and artistic director of Klang Festival – Copenhagen Experimental Music. Originally from Bristol, England, they moved to Copenhagen in 2013. Black's works have attracted a large amount of attention both nationally and internationally for their signature combination of artistic courage and vulnerability, described by the Danish Arts Council as »a universe of real madness where everything goes«. Their work is a deep and personal exploration of topics such as religion, loss, and queer identity, that is unafraid to be stupid or serious in any direction.
© Christian Klintholm
»Music is just something for me.«
Christian Juncker is a Danish musician and songwriter who has released a number of Danish-language albums. He debuted in 1995 with the band Bloom. Together with his friend Jakob Groth Bastiansen, he formed the duo Juncker in 2002. He is also behind the Christmas carol »Luk julefreden ind« from 2024.
© Guy Wasserman
»Music, for me, reveals the emptiness of boundaries and definitions – in consciousness, in space, and in music itself.«
Idan Elmalem is an oud player and composer working across world and popular music, now presenting his debut instrumental EP and live performance project. Following years of collaboration within the Israeli music scene, he turns toward a more personal and intimate musical voice, blending traditional oud with a contemporary sensibility. Influenced by his studies with master Nissim Dakwar, Elmalem’s music explores the space between tradition and innovation. His debut EP, Time, features three live-recorded pieces that move between past, present, and future, combining classical Arabic and Persian elements with jazz, minimalism, and cinematic sound. Based in Tel Aviv, Elmalem draws on his Moroccan-Danish heritage in his work. He is a graduate of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Ethnomusicology at the University of Haifa, alongside his work as a player and composer.
On May 29, the Aalborg-based collective Datahaven9000 takes over the venue Skråen, transforming its main hall into a concentrated one-day festival of electronic music. The event is part of the concert series Bystanders #3, where the stage is handed over to local scenes rather than the venue’s in-house programming.
© PR
Two of contemporary music’s most uncompromising material thinkers meet on Music for Intersecting Planes: the American organist Kali Malone and the French cellist Leila Bordreuil. Malone works with oversaturated blocks of sound and sonic mass as a sustained pressure, while Bordreuil seeks friction – her cello a recalcitrant organism that creaks and resists.
What they share is an ascetic attention to the specificity of their instruments. The organ and the cello are pushed to their outer limits, where recognizability dissolves and overtones emerge like hidden entities.
The title pieces, »Intersecting Planes I» and »II«, unfold as undulating ruptures of sound: animalistic, almost elephantine cries that surge forward and recede again. Only rarely can the sound be identified as organ or cello. (»Pilots in the Night« comes closest to a familiar balance between the organ’s gravity and the cello’s resistance.) Otherwise, the music moves within a field between the metallic and the electronic, as if the sound originates neither from strings nor pipes.
It is not mass that is being explored here, but rather a kind of hollowness: an airiness that is not light, but permeated by an indeterminate resonance – something ancient, almost ceremonial. The album holds something far more porous and open than Malone and Bordreuil’s earlier works. The sound appears as a concave form, bending inward, like an absence of material. The sonic landscape carries its own dissolution within it as an inherent delay – as if the music exists, first and foremost, as the erosion of something one thought one heard.
English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek