Pulse Emitter – Dusk

To be released on CD, cassette, and digitally on 11/18/22. Artwork by HausMo Max. CD packaged in a mini-LP jacket. C44 – smokey tint cassette with white imprints. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To purchase, head to our Bandcamp page.
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Portland-based composer / producer / synthesist Daryl Groetsch creates music under the name Pulse Emitter. Channeling his love and mastery of styles ranging from new age to Berlin school kosmische to drone to progressive electronic music, Groetsch crafts emotionally resonant synth pieces teeming with diverse melodic architectures and textural details. Duskhis third release on Hausu Mountain, follows 2020’s Swirlings LP (HAUSMO92) and his split entry with Brett Naucke in the Mugen series documenting live-in-the-studio performances (HAUSMO53, 2017). The album joins a nearly two-decade long catalog of Pulse Emitter music that includes releases on labels like Aguirre Records, Constellation Tatsu, and NNA Tapes — along with a slate of self-releases of whispered ambient sketches under his given name and forays into the dungeon synth idiom under the moniker Endless FogDusk shifts the dial of Groetsch’s practice a few notches from the all-consuming drift captured on Swirlings towards a more hybridized strain of Pulse Emitter music that treats rhythm and harmonic complexity with equal importance to pure shimmering synth texture. His work bridges themes like the grandeur of the cosmos and the natural beauty of planet Earth with an exploration of the inner-space within the mind, resulting in excursions that prove just as personal to his experience as they are universal in scope.

Dusk finds Groetsch laying out networks of arpeggios and consonant overlapped melodies that build the bedrock for evocative landscapes flecked with abstracted bursts and warped effects processing. Moments of crackling distortion peek through the standing veil of terraced synth lines, while rushes of jittering electronics squelch and bubble up between the sighing breaths of his extended swathes of drone. Similar to the palette of voices employed on Pulse Emitter catalog highlight Through The Portal (Phinery, 2016), Groetsch dots his compositions with moments of pitched percussion, synthetic woodwinds, and digital string instruments rooted in his own study of physical instrument design. Keeping the span of his individual pieces between the 4 and 6 minute mark, Groetsch lays out dynamic narratives that lead us far from their point of departure through multiple acts of complication and denouement. Taken as a whole, the album balances peaks of blissful harmonies and expanses of grid-based rhythmic phrases with trips to gaze at reflective pools and admire the slow ripples emanating from their unseen depths.

Nature serves as a guiding theme for Dusk both in the images conjured by track titles like “Snow Diamonds” or “Temple in the Mountains” and in the corresponding tones that Groetsch paints to illustrate each biome. Snowflakes appear as sharp, crystalline notes over the tundra. “Fireflies” shine in the darkness as cascades of pitch-bent sawtooth waves contrasted against the whistle of pan flutes. As the album approaches its final act with the glistening hum of “Darkening Forest,” Pulse Emitter shifts the narrative towards drift once again as if to signal that the titular Dusk, the period when twilight hangs on the horizon, has nearly ceded its way to night. Album closer “Mulch” digs the deepest into total textural sculpting, only disrupting its standing layer of rough electronic crackle with surges of rounded synth tones that rip through the ground like tectonic rumbles, as if to bring the perspective down from the forest surrounding us and into the mycelial network underground. The relatively harsh tones of the album closer feel more warm and welcoming than threatening. Pulse Emitter reminds us that the process of decomposition will only result in the birth of new life, as the day ends and matter returns to the soil to provide nutrients for whatever will grow next.