For the album Vanishing Point
8 October 2024
On this new collection of works composed for the Hague-based Ensemble Klang, Belgian composer Maya Verlaak continues to develop pieces that function as social experiments in some ways, setting up situations and proposals for musicians forced to negotiate her scores and the group’s internal interactions to make them work. The album opens with “Roulette,” a duet between guitarist Pete Harden and pianist Saskia Lankhoorn who both work their way through a video score formed by two roulette wheels with notes where the numerical values should be. They lay out an array of intervals that the musicians must navigate without verbal communication, trusting their eyes and their internal instincts. The music, pierced by a steady profusion of percussive electronic tones, is simultaneously mediative and dystopian. The title composition is an austere piece for percussion and electronics where seemingly random electronic tones surface when his various cymbal and gong strikes subside into silence, all compounded by Joey Marijs triggering tapping-like electronic rhythms stored on a computer. The musician grapples with the various elements, keeping the rhythmic activity from losing the thread. The album concludes with the ensemble work “Conditions” in which the six players are spread around the outer circumference of the room they perform in, constructing their own hexagonal “virtual space” in which the musicians move around and must adjust to the acoustics of the room in real time, as the ensemble glides through the moody, multi-layered 30 minute work, perpetually but irregularly interrupted by ominous synth blasts.