Like glistening sculptures, Mads Emil Dreyer’s music exists as much in its own sure forms as in the listener’s individual response to them. His music creates conscious hinterlands in which detailed, focused sounds can be observed, like an artwork unfolding in time.
As interested in knobs and buttons as violins and flutes, Mads Emil Dreyer often sets up a dialogue between electroacoustic and acoustic entities. His music might use electronics to blur tonal harmonies, mimic acoustic sounds or place a fog around regimented instrumental robotics. Sometimes, electronics are deployed to counterbalance music with vision, presenting sound and image as two sides of the same process.
Mads Emil Dreyer’s music has been credited in the press for its humanity, beauty, technical discipline and aesthetic focus. He has written for, among others, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Adapter, Athelas Sinfonietta and Neue Vocalsolisten and is a founding member and house composer of the contemporary music group NEKO3.
At the opening concert of KLANG Festival 2021 on May 27, Athelas Sinfonietta will premiere Dreyer's Miniature 3. Here he explores the solution between acoustic and electronic sound sources. With small transducers, he sends sine waves from MIDI keyboards out through strings and chimes, thus becoming a kind of hybrid instrument. The music that emerges is characteristically gentle and simple; in the centre is a calm motif, which becomes the subject of slight distortion in the ensemble.