Vanishing Point collects three works for the musicians of Ensemble Klang by Maya Verlaak (Belgium, 1990). Interactive scores, musical puzzles, lead to unique sonic encounters for performers and listeners. The title track, for percussion solo and live electronics, explores the point at which a resonance disappears, where sound becomes pure ambience. It typifies a form of fragile open-mindedness, present in all three works, that exposes the humanity of Verlaak’s musical process, a humanity that holds control and chaos in a constant state of suspense.

1. Roulette (2021) [7’00]
for piano (Saskia Lankhoorn), electric guitar (Pete Harden) & electronics

2. Vanishing Point (2022) [12’00]
for solo percussion (Joey Marijs) & electronics

3. Conditions (2023) [31’00]
for live sextet, pre-recorded sextet & electronics

Ensemble Klang are:

Erik-Jan de With, saxophones
Tom Sanderman, saxophones
Anton van Houten, trombones
Joey Marijs, percussion
Saskia Lankhoorn, piano and keyboards
Pete Harden, electric guitar
Micha de Kanter, sound & recording

(excerpt from the liner notes by music philosopher Tomas Serrien:)

“In Roulette, I hear a dialogue between a piano and a guitar with a series of electronic intrusive sounds in the foreground with a high, short texture and a rhythmic pattern that is hard to count. Indeed, the meditative process feels like roulette: the electronic sounds are propelled like balls by the instruments, searching for an opening in a spinning mechanical sound device. In the hard-to-count breaks between pianos and guitars I wallow in a dreamy atmosphere that reminds me of Morton Feldman’s expressive music. I imagine myself an aural painter splattering sounds like paint against a white canvas only to look dubiously at one’s own creation, searching for structural lines that reveal a figurative shape in the artwork.

 

Vanishing Point appears with a resonating cymbal. What follows is a series of clicking sounds, beeps and more cymbals that feel like a random sequence of sounds. The structure seems lost, but there is clearly a process going on that suggests some calculation. I envision a typist overwriting invoices like a bureaucrat in a dystopian environment. The process accelerates. There is something futuristic, robotic about the atmosphere. My perception anticipates what is to come, but I get little grasp of the musical patterns. Toward the end, a bright bell sound grabs my attention. Like an hourglass, it gives a sense of time pressure, as if something urgently needs to be finished. I prepare myself for a climax until suddenly the piece ends in the same abrupt way it began.

 

From the start, Conditions is bathed in an alienating hypnotic atmosphere. Repetitive and minimalist, it breathes in my ear. At about half an hour long, the piece feels like a long musical sigh. There is a slow build-up in which a melee of transparent horns, subtle guitar lines and sudden piano, percussion and electronic sounds guide me to an indeterminate endpoint. The electronic glitches intrigue me. It seems as if my perception is reset again and again. It creates an aural bubble that completely surrounds me like a moving object in another space. That musical space within which the sounds move seems fluid and could fall apart at any moment.”