Mads Emil Dreyer

July 3, 2024
Mads Emil Dreyer 010 Photo by David Stjernholm

Mads Emil Dreyer's music has been praised in the press for its humanity, beauty, technical discipline and aesthetic orientation. He has written, among others, for Ensemble Recherche, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Adapter, Athelas Sinfonietta and Neue Vocalsolisten and was a member and house composer of the contemporary music group NEKO3. “Bølger”: Most early films were recorded with a single camera. Many of these films consist of a single image and a single motif. What the viewer sees is often not a clear narrative, but rather the quiet life of an isolated object. In my piece Bølger (in English Waves), I sampled the 1895 short film Rough Sea at Dover made by British film pioneers R.W. Paul and Birt Acres. I modified it significantly by using double exposure effects, varying playback speeds, and applying different types of filters. The sounds are derived from a set of simple sine wave synthesizers playing an ascending scale at a slow speed. The gradual upward movement in the frequency register is reflected in the increasing saturation of the image. What emerges is a blurred audiovisual movement going from dark to light. Following the aesthetics of these first films, the play does not have complex dramaturgy. Rather, it relies on the power of what is never fully revealed. A clear image almost materializes, but then disappears again. The movement that brings the image to life is the same movement that makes it disappear.