Behind this intricate and complex album lies an incredibly simple message: little actions can make a big difference, while the combination of little actions can make an exponentially big difference. Rutger Hoedemaekers tested this theory by composing parts for twenty instruments playing at different tempos, then integrating the results. At first it was as he had feared: “a big mess,” with occasional serendipitous synchonizations. But after minor tweaks, the pieces began to fall into place. He then turned the passages over to a group of live musicians, who made their own minor adjustments, resulting in a harmonious whole.
The album is a metaphor for the human response to climate change. What if, instead of doing nothing or working at odds with each other, everyone made only a minor change? Might the problem be solved? References to famously unsolvable mathematical problems in the track titles is a nod to the challenge; the final track title (which we’ll get to soon) is either a warning, an encouragement, or both. The irony is that the music is so upbeat that without the description, one might never glean the theme; perhaps there is a correlation to the thought that when everything seems to be going well, everything is going well, which can lead to inaction. The same principle holds true for the cover. Only those who know history will recognize the canary in the coal mine.
Voice and percussion launch the album, which gains instruments as swiftly as the grille of a race car gathers bugs. One intuits the underlying tension between synchronized and unsychronized, chaos and control. Beneath the percussion, one begins to sense a guiding hand in the extended chords; there is more method here than madness. Mallet instruments claim the primary timbres, but without the brass, strings, synth and guitar, their appeal would be greatly reduced. Instead, over the course of the album, the repeatedly answered question is, “How many people can play together without the whole thing falling apart?”
Play two songs of different tempos at once, and they will eventually, although briefly, match up. These performers solve the problem with intuitive transitions, demonstrated in the finale of the second piece. The tone shifts in “Concept of a continuous group of transformations without the assumption of the differentiability of the functions defining the group.” (What a title!) In this piece, Hoedemaekers’ voice is slowed, then transposed into a series of alarm-like glissandos, forming overlapping layers of drones. As the album is primarily light, the dark spot adds an essential balance. “Expression of Definite Forms by Squares” expounds upon this darkness, gradually leaning toward the light like a morning flower. In the center lies a complete stop followed by a shift: an unspoken path forward.
Czeslaw Milosz wrote the poem A Song on the End of the World in 1944 in Warsaw. The poem needs little added context. Hoedemaekers adopts the last two lines as the title of the closing track, hoping to end “on an emotional and optimistic note,” but poems are slippery things, and the other lines fight against it. In one sense, “No one believes it is happening now,” and life goes on as usual, even if the face of the looming apocalypse. In another, someone notices, and still tries to do a little good, even in his final minutes. The interpretation of the poem and the album leave the control of the poet and the composer, and now rest in the minds of the reader and listener. (Richard Allen)
