Ensemble Dal Niente - portrait RE / Flux / Pacific Time

 

Ensemble Dal Niente - portrait RE / Flux / Pacific Time

Ensemble Dal Niente's recent album features three composers, each of whom have a history of collaboration with the group. The commissioned works all have their own unique approach to Dal Niente's expertise with experimental music. As a whole, the album is an incredible example of how successful new works can be when there is a strong relationship between composers and the ensemble.

Igor Santos' portrait RE opens the album. The sixteen-minute work for sampler and large ensemble immediately creates a grand sense of atmosphere with electronic white noise and ambient-sounding swells in the ensemble. Pretty quickly, the sampler sounds Santos chooses come across as cliché and the computer start-ups noises gimmicky. Despite this, Santos incorporates some incredible moments of beauty throughout the piece. His use of the recording of Paulo Freire and deconstructing it with the low instruments in the ensemble is both engaging and shows off his orchestrational ingenuity. This spoken statement comes back to close the piece, with the voice being echoed by the full ensemble. While the ending creates a sense of cohesion and cinches the piece together with a final bass drum hit, I found Santos' musical message to be vague and ominous at best.

Flux is an intense and dense work by composer George Lewis. Throughout the piece, there is a continual sense of unnerved motion, with little to no sense of alleviation. Even within the relatively tranquil moments, Lewis finds a way to cultivate a sense of extreme movement, as though we are passersby through someone else's stressful and highly intricate life.

The album closes with Carola Bauckholt's Pacific Time, a nearly twenty-minute work which hits you right off the bat with powerful blasts of noise, becoming almost nauseating after extending for more than three minutes. Pacific Time is, if anything, more of an intricately notated soundscape, allowing one to experience Bauckholt's perception of the natural sounds of the foggy west coast. The middle section of the work features a percussion solo, brushing and hitting multiple wooden boxes. While a stark contrast from the previous two pieces, the noise of Pacific Time was to me the most successful in terms of relaying the composer's intent to both the ensemble and the listener.


find on New Focus Recordings here

© 2026 Brutal New Music Reviews

originally written and published 29 January 2026
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