Arnold Dreyblatt — Descendants: Music for Four Pipe Organs in One Space
Descendants: Music for Four Pipe Organs in One Space serves up a single fifty-minute piece based around gradually shifting resonances. It wonderfully moves from the bright & rising to the shrill & lightly searing, though to more droningly pressing, at points, angularly unbalancing fare.
The release appeared on Unsounds Records at the start of this year in the form of a CD. It comes presented in a green, grey, and black text-based gatefold, with inside a short write-up about the work and pictures of the four players at their pipe organs.
Arnold Dreyblatt (New York City, 1953) is an American media artist and composer. He has been based in Berlin, Germany since 1984. He is also Vice-Director of the Visual Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. From 2009 to 2023, he was Professor of Media Art at the Muthesius Academy of Art and Design (Muthesius Kunsthochschule) in Kiel, Germanåy.
All of his work seemingly sits in the minimalist genre, and you can certainly hear this in the piece presented here- with nods towards the likes of Reich & Niblock, but Dreyblatt certainly has his own take on the form- creating a decidedly hypnotic and subtly shifting mass of pressing & persistent sound here.
The four players here are: Claudio F. Baroni: “Verschueren” organ (reconstruction, style of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, 19th century, French), Reiner van Houdt: Cabinet Organ (1767, NL), Arnold Dreyblatt: “Utopa” organ, (Baroque / Contemporary, NL / Germany / Japan, 2018), and Lucie Nezri: “Van Straten” Organ (1479, reconstruction, NL)
The single piece presented here runs at the 50:42 mark and remains very full & pressing throughout. There is a wonderful sense of a steadily unfurling pitch about the whole thing, with the mood effectively shifting from positive and bright to more malevolent and hoveringly searing.
Descendants: Music for Four Pipe Organs in One Space is a most engaging and eventful slice of droned-out minimalism. And I can highly recommend it for those times when you want to block out the world around you and just drift off in subtle shifting pitch and mood.