Throughout its history and many forms, the requiem has become synonymous with deep, often suffocating mourning, solemnity, and piety. From the earliest variants shaped around Gregorian chants to contemporary pieces such as Michel Chion’s harrowing electronic experiment Requiem (1978), composers have accompanied death with a sense of finality and befittingly grandiose, grave musical statements that seemed to forget the ecstatic resurrection at the core of the Catholic faith. But then there have been others, like Laurence Pike, willing to subvert things further. The Australian drummer and composer’s take on the requiem mass steps outside this traditional frame of reference and its overbearing moods, gesturing instead towards a lighter, almost pantheistic understanding of the world.
“All life is a constant transition of states,” he writes in the extensive liner notes for The Undreamt-of Centre, a requiem for choir, drums, and electronics. Mirroring these thoughts, his music becomes a curiously inflected, both joyful and melancholy reflection on the transformations and infinite small endings and beginnings that occur around us in every passing moment. At the heart of the record’s eight pieces we find Pike’s nimble, pulsating drumming and textural percussive work, reminiscent of Greg Fox’s or Eli Keszler’s softer electroacoustic moments.
On the opening ‘Introit’, his sharp cymbal hits linger as if frozen in time, while toms and kicks resonate into small tremors underneath. At times, the drum patterns appear to fall neatly in line, circling and repeating themselves akin to the hypnotic minimalism of Terry Riley. At others, they shape progressive rhythms or dissipate into the busy clatter of clapping hardwood, thrumming along towards some uncertain destination. Besides them, the Vox Sydney Philharmonia Choir hums gorgeous, slowly rising and falling phrases, while Josephine Brereton breaks out into a celestial soprano solo. Loosely set to the Greek myth of Orpheus, the choir’s song is wordless yet carries a rich narrative in its melodies and harmonies.
Created in the wake of COVID-19 lockdowns and the death of his father-in-law, there are passages strewn across the album that feel particularly intimate – fragile remembrances embedded in evocative field recordings and chiming effects like those found on the diffuse ambient of ‘The Undreamt-of Centre’. Continuing the fascination with rituals of 2019’s Holy Spring, each of the cuts feels as if following some unwritten rite, using a sparse palette of sounds to paint rich sceneries.
Pike fashions ‘Orpheus In The Underworld’ in the image of warm electronica, with thumping drums that mimic synthetic beats and voices that appear and disappear as if they were samples controlled by pads and modular synths, wrapping around each other, then pushing apart. Elsewhere, the jump from ‘Eurydice’ to ‘Requiem Aeternam’ provides one of the most exciting movements on record. The fragile, stuttering piano progression, barely there percussion, and murmuring choir song of the former track shift into the thrilling, forward driven arrangement of the latter, where bubbling synth lines and urgent drum pomp draw you into a funky 1970s action film score.
Ultimately, ‘All Is Distance’ breaks things down again one last time. This gradually unfurling textural and rhythmic flow reminiscent of The Necks lays The Undream-of Centre to rest, but the music feels without explicit beginning or end, as if it could continue contracting and expanding for eternity.
