Review: Jacob Kirkegaard - Arc

Like the moon sped up, I watch Arc fade between radiance and hideous darkness. The surface is forever in motion. An illuminated underside slips beneath cloaks of shadow and then re-emerges into light, always fading in the direction of either joy or decay. Within the wheel of eternal movement, any beauty or misery feels accidental; a chance alignment that just happens to trigger an emotional resonance within me for just a moment, forever sweeping the spectrum of harmonic possibility like a lighthouse beam, rotating between faces of major and minor key (and all of those strange, ambiguous dissonances in between).

These two 18-minute pieces feel like snips from an infinite ribbon. There is in fact no beginning or end to either half, and the fades on either side mark the commencement of listener observation rather than the birth and death of the music itself. Apparently both consist of music from the time of Joan Of Arc (1412-1431), stretched out into drones of violins and the sighs of choral voices. It’s an inversion of my usual relationship with history. Normally, past events are gradually wrung of their emotional nuance and preserved as rocks of objective, dispassionate fact. By magnifying fleeting moments of harmony into chords that settle upon the bed of time, I hear the inferences, conflicts and hesitations that inform the micro-moments of musical composition – a composer imbuing each harmonic shape with fragments of themselves and the place-time they inhabit, as prone to doubt and anxiety as the present day.