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To be released on LP on both aqua blue vinyl and black vinyl, and CD on September 26th, 2025. Artwork by HausMo Max. CD packaged in 4-panel gatefold digipak. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To purchase, head to our Bandcamp page.

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Portland based producer / synthesist Daryl Groetsch composes music under the moniker Pulse Emitter. Channeling his love and mastery of styles ranging from new age to Berlin school kosmische to drone to progressive electronic music to noise akin to junk floating through deep space, Groetsch crafts emotionally resonant synth pieces teeming with diverse melodic architectures and textural details. A mainstay of the American experimental underground for over two decades, he has released dozens of albums of his exploratory and ever-evolving output as Pulse Emitter which have appeared on labels including Aguirre Records, Constellation Tatsu, and NNA tapes, while self-releasing music under his given name and as his dungeon synth side project Endless Fog. Tide Pools, Groetsch’s new LP on Hausu Mountain, follows the relatively more languid ambient strains of his work found on Swirlings (HAUSMO92 – 2020) and Dusk (HAUSMO128 – 2022) with a dizzying excursion into kinetic rhythms and fast-morphing song structures. Groetsch himself describes the album as an attempt “to explore the deep emotions possible from jazz harmony, manifest the rhythmic complexity always chattering around in my head, and push my music somewhere I haven’t.”

Pulse Emitter’s goal to actively complicate the mood of Tide Pools beyond a single overarching atmosphere results in some of his most dynamic and emotive work to date, as we follow the album’s winding narrative through its diverse chapters and shifts in energy. The album teems with rapid-fire arpeggios and labyrinthine melodies as Groetsch lays out intricate webs of shifting chords and changes tempos between passages, laying out a series of distinct environments that we watch unfold from the shoreline. Though it rarely breaks into any legible drum beats, relying on the percussive tones of his synthesizers alone to sketch out his ornate rhythms, the album channels the forward motion of IDM and prog rock as much as the harmonies and irregular time signatures found in jazz fusion, translating ideas from these traditions into the frameworks of purely electronic synth fantasias. Using both software and hardware instruments, Pulse Emitter’s palette on Tide Pools highlights digital mallets and rompler-like approximations of orchestral woodwinds and string instruments, contrasting these sounds against networks of lush pads and more abstract peals of texture — all planted over speaker-rumbling eruptions of bass. This hybridized style of synthesizer composition allows Groetsch to sculpt divergent moods between (and within) his songs, from aqueous calm contemplation to burbling segments of turmoil to nebulous swathes of open-ended mystery.

Explaining the background behind Tide Pools, Groetsch says, “I spent time last year looking at tide pools on the San Juan islands in Washington State and was impressed with how they are like little worlds with so much activity going on. I’m always inspired by expansive spaces, but for this album I went small. Think microscope imagery, electronics, bugs, plants, atoms. The tide pools also made me think of evolution and how life on Earth formed in the oceans and eventually made its way onto land. This is what the second half of the album is about.” The microscopic nature of the album comes across in its deluge of pointillist staccato notes, which Groetsch weaves together into accelerating cascades that wash out the stereo spread. At other moments, he dials down the density of his synth layers and lets isolated swells enter the mix one by one, airing out their own fine-grain voices — or locks everything into a closely-knit grid that bubbles along in tight sequences that approach the post-minimalist soundscapes of artists like David Borden or Steve Roach. As Groetsch sweeps us into his bustling ecosystems, we feel like individual cells traveling down capillaries as much as solitary plankton catching waves and coasting into whirlpools. Tide Pools pulls off the rare feat of providing its listeners with an imagistic foundation through its song titles and album art, but transcending those expressed themes with its simply thrilling multi-faceted arrangements and harmonic twists. We put on Tide Pools and we’re there with Pulse Emitter at the San Juan islands watching the creatures and anemones swirl in the surf, but we’re also particles floating through our internal mind’s eye as we explore the infinite space conjured by the grandeur of his work.