Opening Night

Laurel Halo’s Atlas is a shadowy work of startling complexity: a fogbank of a record, emotionally ambiguous and dense with dissonance. Emblazoned with a blurry photograph of the artist on its cover, the 2023 release inaugurated Halo’s label, Awe, with an implicit challenge: Good luck getting a bead on the American composer. Over the past decade and a half, her discography has run through avant-pop, minimalist electronics, ambient jazz fusion, and even tough, propulsive club music; Atlas drove home her determination to be elusive.

Awe’s second release, from Danish artists MK Velsorf and Aase Nielsen, at first seems like it couldn’t be further from Atlas’ zero-visibility murk. The mood is relaxed, a little ruminative—occasionally anxious or slightly wistful, but only in an absent-minded way. The music appears even less complicated than the mood. Everything is right there on the surface: patient electric piano, trim lines of clean-tone electric guitar, lilting loops of hand percussion. None of it is much more forceful than a long sigh. Repeated phrases twist slowly in place, like mobiles; despite a thin papering of reverb, there’s no disguising that these songs are mostly empty space.

If Opening Night sounds like background music, that’s because it is. Velsorf (aka Mads Kristian Højlund Frøslev, of TLF Trio) and Nielsen (director of Copenhagen’s Boli Group, and a session player with credits for Dean Blunt and Slim0) wrote these pieces for the inauguration of New Theater Hollywood, an experimental space run by artists Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff out of the former 2nd Stage Theater, a 49-seat venue on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. Ensconced in the balcony, the two musicians serenaded guests as they entered, filled the time between celebratory speeches, and kept playing as attendees, presumably, sipped bubbly and snacked on canapes. The album was recorded on the spot. (Halo sits in on piano on one song.) In the longest piece, the nearly 16-minute title track, the murmur of crowd noise burbles faintly beneath drum-machine pitter-patter and breezy synth-and-guitar interplay, breaking the fourth wall and turning partygoers into extras.

Stylistically, Opening Night falls in with a recent wave of self-consciously chill material with one foot in the cut-out bins; I’m thinking of the spongy new-age fusion of Total Blue, the lackadaisical pop-rock of Jack J, the smeary ambient jazz of Lifted, the bedroom Balearic of Hotspring. But Velsorf and Nielsen’s music is more skeletal than any of those reference points; it does more with less. Songs are built out of simple looping phrases that soldier dutifully on without pause or variation. The sound quality is unvarnished, the rhythms rudimentary—the drum machine sounds like one of those old wood-paneled gizmos with preset foxtrot beats—and the frills nil.

Velsorf’s guitar tone sometimes recalls the liquid drip of Durutti Column, or the silvery flicker of Brian Eno’s “snake guitar” on Another Green World, but you could just as easily hear in it the plaintive twang of ’80s blockbusters like Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer.” The duo’s mood-board minimalism is suffused in a cool remove—but far removed from conventional notions of cool. (In this, they share something with their countrywoman ML Buch, who is at the vanguard of artists recontextualizing outmoded tropes from mainstream guitar music.) In “House in the Hills,” field recordings—distant rolling surf and critters in the underbrush—flesh out a cinematic sense of place. Opening Night is steeped in the cultural imaginary of LA, nodding to the concrete-and-neon noir of Michael Mann, the Santa Ana winds of Joan Didion, the apocalyptic prophecies of Mike Davis’ City of Quartz.

In an Instagram post ahead of the gig, Nielsen wrote, “furniture music tomorrow”—a reference to Erik Satie’s musique d’ameublement, a style of background music the French composer dreamed up in the early 20th century. No doubt influenced by his own work as a cabaret pianist, these were pieces of indeterminate duration consisting of simple melodic phrases meant to be repeated as long as the musicians saw fit. “I imagine it to be melodious,” he wrote, “softening the clatter of knives and forks without dominating them, without imposing itself.” But Satie was also a trickster who loved to subvert conventions, fond of absurdist performance directions and Dadaist pranks; his idea of background music was hardly the equivalent of Spotify’s supine mood-boosters. In a 1920 performance of his musique d’ameublement, a note in the program instructed the audience to ignore the music; when they sat too attentively, his fellow composer Darius Milhaud later wrote, he shouted at them: “Go on talking! Walk about! Don’t listen!”

Furniture music is an apt comparison point, then, for the Danish duo’s performance at the New Theater Hollywood: Their music is unpretentious and utilitarian, but also playful, and playfully subversive—darkening subtly as the album proceeds, placid passages giving way to fleeting snarls of dissonance. It lurks in the background but tugs at the corners of your subconscious. Looping without end, flickering over the scene like a highway mirage, Opening Night feels like a perfect expression of something the classical critic Alex Ross wrote about Satie’s furniture music: “There is no development, no transition, only an instant prolonged.” Perhaps it is not so different from Halo’s Atlas after all; it is trickier than it seems.