Compilation

Shifting Energy

By Jens Povlsen

‘Composition is a game where I shift energy around.’

This is how Jens Peter Møller describes his approach to creating music. It is a statement full of immediacy, but behind the words lies a keen and intense awareness. When a composer faces infinity – the blank score and its untold possibilities – play is not an escape, but a necessary strategy to get the energy flowing. You have to find somewhere to begin.

The work Compilation (2019), which premiered at the PULSAR Festival in Copenhagen that same year, is the result of precisely such a strategy. It was not conceived as a finished idea, more or less ready to be filled in; rather, it has grown organically from the ground up in Møller’s hands. While completing his composition studies at the conservatoire in Copenhagen, Møller, whose roots lie in both rock and jazz, chose to disregard conventional forms. There would be no string quartet, no traditional chamber music setup. He wanted to assemble his own team.

The result was an ensemble that most resembles a supersized band: five percussionists, two pianists (piano and synthesiser), electric guitar, double bass, and a conductor. The emphasis on percussion is no accident. According to Møller, percussionists often possess a particular openness to sound; when presented with a new sound source, they rarely ask ‘why?’, but rather a curious ‘how?’.

Sampling Reality
It is exactly this ‘how?’ that drives Møller’s work. He is a composer who needs to ‘touch’ the sound. While working on Compilation, he isolated himself in an empty country house, filled the living room with instruments, and began his search. He describes his method as akin to hip-hop’s use of samples: he finds a sound – a deep note on a double bass, a scrape, a pitch bend on a synthesizer – and examines it as if it were a physical object.

These sounds become pieces in a jigsaw puzzle where the final picture is unknown. ‘My ideas don’t reveal themselves to me as grand, cohesive sequences,’ he explains. The material emerges as isolated islands of sound that must be processed, honed, twisted, and turned before eventually finding their place in the whole. It is a matter of trust – a belief that if you listen to the fragments long enough, they will begin to talk to one another. A piano chord might awaken the memory of a film; the sound of a sardine tin insists on being heard. The task is to organise these energies until they form a pattern.

The Hidden Engine
But what binds these fragments together? In Compilation, there is a distinct rhythmic undercurrent – what Møller calls a ‘hidden engine’. Through several journeys to Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Mali, he has acquired a rhythmic understanding that differs markedly from the Western classical tradition.

Whereas in the West we are often taught to count time and let rhythm submit to harmony, the tempo in West African music is a phenomenon that arises in the space between the musicians. It is a collective feeling; nobody keeps the pulse for the others – everyone carries it. Slight shifts are not mistakes, but a way of expressing life. This philosophy permeates the work. It is music where time bends, and where the musicians are invited to feel one another rather than merely count bar lines on a page.

A Pocket of Time
Across the six movements of Compilation, Møller draws the listener into this distinct pocket of time. It opens with ‘(new pattern)’, a frantic and polyrhythmic movement where deconstructed rhythms weave a web of irregular time signatures. It is the sound of the engine starting. From here, the music moves into a meditative exploration of the harmonic series on the synthesiser, onwards to the collage ‘(combine)’, where the fragments collide, before culminating in a sixth movement where the entire ensemble unites in an unbroken chain of unison rhythms.

Along the way, we also encounter a simple, mechanical drive. The fourth movement, originally intended for an amplified five-note sardine-tin kalimba, is performed here on a synthesizer solo. It remains a poignant reminder of the work’s point of departure: a profound curiosity towards the individual sound, no matter how big or small.

© Jens Povlsen, 2026

Jens Povlsen is editor at Dacapo Records and holds an MA in Musicology. A former presenter for DR P2, his background includes serving as a music critic for Jyllands-Posten, among others.