Varolii Patterns

Duane Pitre has always had an eloquent take on minimalism, which might be to do with the strange route he’s taken to this music – from pro skateboarder, through heavy rock groups, to experimentation. He released several particularly lovely albums across 2012 and 2013, Feel Free and Bridges, which seemed best to sum up the soundworld he inhabits; on an album like 2023’s Varolii Patterns, you can hear further refinements, and a steelier focus on Just Intonation as tuning system (and guiding principle). Something about the way Pitre structures his pieces for eight-voice synthesizer allows them to be deeply evocative over a short time span (most pieces here sit between three to nine minutes), so there’s a kind of pop poetry to these lovely collisions of drones, stacked in ways that allow polyrhythms to slide in and out of the ear’s focus. It’s beautiful stuff.