For reasons possibly not worth dissecting, some sounds are so beautiful they cause a deeply emotional effect. Something in the opening minutes of Henrik Pultz Melbye’s new album Drømmene is filed with this powerful wave. A form of classic minimalism that echoes back to the Koyaanisqatsi score by Philip Glass. A simple gesture brimming with spinetingling heft, gently looped into effortless perfection for just over 3 and a half minutes.
Melbye’s album Drømmene, which translates from his native Danish into ‘dreams’ is quick to encourage the listener to manifest strangely invocative mirages emitting from this music.
The entire album is an exploration of both the saxophone and an Electronic Wind Instrument (EWI), both of which are then affected in a range of ways. From this relativity restricted palette, the plethora of moods and textures are as open as the title.
Pinning any kind of narrative to this music is clear when looking at what these titles translate as – the dream, the moon, the island, heaven, the road, the city, the forest, the beach and the dream again.
But far from any sort of story, taken simply as a succession of starting points of mysterious threads – the whole project delights in an ambiguous amorphous quality. Unfamiliarity with Danish doesn’t inhibit or spoil anything here, rather it allows you to endlessly redraw each part, exactly as you see fit. A platform for your own inaccurate imagination.
Månen and Øen are smudged sweeps over an ominous futuristic city. Himlen, a dizzying trawl through a hallucinatory desert marketplace, pecked at with banks of biting electronic fuzz.
Despite the brief looping ecstasies of Vejen the oozing drift of Byen stretches out like Terry Riley’s hall of mirrors invaded by oblique slabs of oddness. Skoven, like a Cy Twombly painting in sound, before Stranden somehow finally moors some huge spacecraft, vast enough to fill the sky. Finally, the closer, Drømmen igen returns to a more blurred version of the opening track.
Overall, the structure here delights in how significance and meaning often jar with simplest of musical outcomes – how the music makes you feel.
Drømmene might initially feel like a gentle and tasteful ambience, but quickly pulls you into huge filmic sweeps, sonic dramas playing out in thick atmospherics. Music that encases you, and pulls you into lucid new places…
Drømmene is out now and available on both cassette and digitally
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