Across his work for small and large ensembles, Torvund coaxes together acoustic and electronic sounds that have no business being in the same place—the likes of robot noises, woozy exotica, and grand symphonic sweeps—and yet, through Torvund’s deft assembly, occur to the ear as utterly matchmade. A steampunk feeling pervades this album, in which sounds of past, present, and future enter the composer’s compositional centrifuge and exit as an eternal Technicolor braid. As with many of the composer’s works, the question quickly becomes less about how he gets us to so many implausible destinations than for how long it is possible to stay there. 

“Sweet Pieces“ (2016) originated in one of Torvund’s preferred points of departure: inviting electronic and acoustic instruments to take after one another. As a title, Torvund acknowledges, “Sweet Pieces” is a bit of a provocation: “they’re short and sweet, nothing more.” Yet, within a musical field better known for impenetrable dissonances and funereal airs than for a sense of fun, to be as earnestly wide-eyed and bushy-tailed as Sweet Pieces is to throw down a very cute sort of gauntlet. 

Like many Torvund pieces, “Archaic Jam” (2017) began life as a proposition that could double as the opening of a joke: what if an orchestra, feedback guitar, and sampler player were compeers in a postapocalyptic hippie jam session? Torvund’s score emulates the jam not so much in structure, or lack thereof, as in its happy-go-lucky insouciance, which is perhaps the most sensible reply to the very end of it all. When the flames start to lap at our ankles, we could do worse than to just hold hands and sing. 

In “Symphonic Poem No. 1: Forest Morning” (2019), tendrils of synth, winds, and strings inspire thoughts of an environment sprouting from scratch; said forest then assumes its full, leafy proportions in a progression that recalls the opening gambit of Maurice Ravel’s 1912 orchestral work Daphnis and Chloe. Whereas “Sweet Pieces” is an examination of shortform, in “Forest Morning,” Torvund attends to a longer arc, navigating through murky passages back to its opening Romantic vitality, which is made all the more pastoral by a departing bovine groan in the contrabass. 

“A Walk into the Future” (2019) opens with a sense of early-morning gusto: the orchestra whistles a strident melody, accompanied by a snare drum march. “Walk” eventually proves itself an understatement: we’re swimming through glissandi, cycling through electronic burbles, and racing headlong into its initial aleatoric bustling. For Torvund, who finished the work shortly before his father, the sculptor Gunnar Torvund, passed away, these flustered pitches sound the unknown, the incomprehensibility of loss and what comes after life. We can’t sidestep the void—but we can head in whistling.