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. 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.
