Jonathan Nangle/Crash Ensemble: Pause – close to the sound of silence

Most music is a form of takeover, a takeover that banishes silence. But there is music that chooses to hover around the edge of inaudibility, repeatedly emerging from and retreating into nothingness. This selection of works for various combinations of strings, written between 2008 and 2016, shows Jonathan Nangle (born 1981) mostly as an explorer of soft-grained textures of string on bow who seems to take nearly as much interest in the decay of the repetitive sounds he's imagined as in the sounds themselves. The most recent piece, Tessellate, moves a solo cello into a busier, choppier background of electronic sounds. The playing of members of Crash Ensemble seems a little coarser than the ideas behind the music.ergodos.ie