DRIFT NOWHERE PAST/THE ADVENTURE OF SLEEP

                        [ 2CD  Elsewhere Music ]

"drift nowhere past" is a collection of journal entries that focuses on whatever is entering into the mind on a specific day each month; the other piece "the adventure of sleep" concentrates on situations that recur every day: realizing the passing of time, hearing the sounds of neighbours, the moment of falling asleep, the moment of waking up. Like 'drift nowhere past’, 'the adventure of sleep' spans a six-month period and again the material simply came from what was already there, accessible, happening, remembered, imagined or otherwise.

“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”   (Franz Kafka)

                                         

reviews                                

INACTUELLES,  MUSIQUES SINGULIÈRES     Dionys Della Luce

     

   

"..A monument! Two precious discs with a sonic collection that take us so far away, yet at the same time so close and in the end it brings us back to the depths of ourselves, our intimate history. Reinier van Houdt is the composer of two miraculous drifts, bathing in an unforgettable oneiric grace.. The notion of the instrument is fully transcended here. The world becomes music, becomes musicalized, carried along in a stream of consciousness..a faint pulsation animates an elegiac flood, before it goes under in its final shipwreck..the luminous trail of a sonic comet unfolds in slow waves accompanied by scintillations, from where the composer's stream of consciousness appears, like a world in itself, a crossroads of formidable powers that give us this series of beautiful radiating drifts..In the end there is destruction, in a long halo of transparent beauty..After the daily apocalypse of waking up or falling asleep you seem to have fallen into a fold, buried in tiny vibrations, dull thuds and a faint colossal deep breathing, but it is as if all is sucked up by a light that might bring you back to day.."

 

 

ESOTEROS   april 2022  Michele Palozzo

     

  

"..part of it appears to be a diary, but as a whole it consistently represents a progressive – and tragic – descent into the underworld of the mind, a Sebald-like journey at the ultimate border between memory and oblivion, studded with scant perceptive handholds offered by fragments of known melodies and voices, nothing more than half-answers in the guise of ephemeral reminiscences.. All of it’s already encapsulated in that first, instinctive evocation from the lied “Der Leiermann”, the final moment of Franz Schubert’s “Winterreise” cycle:..the title track can’t be anything but an attempt to fabricate a momentary panacea, a space of intimacy that no malevolent presence can access. The subsequent iterations of this ritual, however, make apparent the futility of this purpose, and restlessness surfaces back in much less composite forms...When compared with the somber, even deadly intensity of the first disc, the complementary "the adventure of sleep" appears as a cold-minded – yet far from lucid – re-immersion into the same uneasy crevices of the unconscious... for Reinier van Houdt this arduous accomplishment seems almost to have been the pretext for sinking hands deep into the repressed, a niche of his own complex individuality.. Only in this way can the contingent instance of the pandemic become universal, the solitary song a nocturne of the soul which, through different and inscrutable ways, manages to touch anyone’s heart."

 

 

LIVORE    2022 Roberto Persissinotto

     

"..this is a crossing of the creative Acheron to an eerie land where time and tones lose their meaning and give way to more liminal forms. Reinier van Houdt is an extremely subtle composer, working with minimal sounds that play with one's perception: these sparkling compositions create a special form of hauntology, they never succumb to just noise or a-musicality, they emanate auditory stimulae in surprising patterns: they build familiarity with the appearing and disappearing of sounds, generating sudden bursts of meaning. The piano sounds unreal, in its absurd melodic presence it stresses the indeterminacy of the whole..here the in-between state is navigated by a sonorous half-sleep with a somehow thrilling result.."

 

 

DUSTED MAGAZINE    may 2022  Marc Medwin

     

"..The two large works taken together move from something nearly, or sometimes, frenetic toward a slower and gentler permeability, or malleability. It may be this, the persistent bleed of one thing into, around and through another, that signals any sense of permutation. Many paths through the ten individual pieces can be taken. The voice and its fractured, fragmented and repeated texts may constitute one of them. The piano in its various environments follows a similar route. Beyond all of this, there are the things, the substances made manifest at the door, the window, just beyond the fence, the stream or the field.. Each sound is and is not, chronology playing only a minor role in the quiet and transcendent pleasure of experiencing each gesture. Each through-listening exposes layers of subtlety while consigning others to a lush but deceptively transparent background. Beyond, there is the gradual slowing, a tempo-less tempo bringing all toward the transient and reflective delicacy of near somnolence, necessitating only observation and acceptance."

 

 

MAGNET MAGAZINE     june 2022   Joshua Hedley

     

"..Each track on Drift Nowhere Past is a world unto itself, but the cumulative effect is like re-reading a series of letters sent during a time of trial.. like bulletins from a space bounded, on one hand, by the unreality of a pandemic, and on the other, by a zone of untouchable mystery that defied the ugly facts of life and death on the ground.. the music feels quite still, as though the atmosphere had vanished, but somehow left perceivable sound behind.. threads of synthetic sound pushing like worms through an airless void..a sequence of sampled creaks, groans and voices drift by, while van Houdt picks out notes that seem to get bumped aside by the flotsam. At one point, his own playing is pushed away by someone else’s piano recording, as though we’re listening in on a moment of solitary.. then he gets deeper into the material, but also infused it with a sense of self-observation..van Houdt’s piano is situated in the background, like a representative of unconscious awareness while the composer sets his mind to manipulating collected delineations of time and mystery in the foreground..As van Houdt has honed his facilities, the music’s quiet power has only grown.."