Håkon Stene and Ensemble neoN’s Kristine Tjøgersen perform and interpret Pisaro’s minimal-leaning compositions, as nineteen very short dream-like pieces assembled into four groups as per the work’s title. At times this is little more than ambient found sound, distant windy city atmospheres and light industrial tones, processed slightly so the volume shifts unnaturally. At other times, such as in piece IV, this is pure avant garde classical performance with bass clarinets (piece IV and several others) or dark synthetic organs (piece XIII).

The press release encourages the listener to admire the piece’s waveforms, which are deliberately low at times with sporadic and abrupt peaks- “a gift from the composer to the listener”, it says, as part of one of the most pretentious PR descriptions I have ever read. The prosaic result of this is steady drones, some familiar, some unnaturally filtered and unrecognisable, some deep, some tinnitus-high, with some sharp jolts of spontaneous noise that prevents this work from going onto anyone’s sleep playlist. There’s an underlying antagonism which after a while, begins to grate.

Personally I’m very fond of both clarinet tones and ambience, so perhaps my hopes were too high, but this feels like a missed opportunity to create something beautifully simple. It’s certainly lush in sections, with the closing part XIX leaving fond memories. However the sometimes abrupt stop-start attitude plays against the strength of the performance, failing to justify the ostentatiousness of the concept’s text, and the result is something that is not sadly as magnificent as it might have been.