Bruun, Delbecq & Westergaard
Opening Arcs. Pendulum
Review
23
July, 2026
By: Emma Forestier
Photo: Artist’s Concession
Opening Arcs. Pendulum. (ILK MUSIC, 2026). Review from In&OutJazz Magazine. Benoît Delbecq, piano / Jonas Westergaard, bass / Peter Bruun, drums
With Opening Arcs, the trio Pendulum opens a space where music becomes movement, where time becomes matter, and where gravity itself begins to sing.
Bringing together Benoît Delbecq on piano, Jonas Westergaard on bass, and Peter Bruun on drums, the project unfolds slowly, in successive waves. Eight releases, spread over eight months beginning on May 16, 2026, form a vast cycle of nearly three hours of music. Each Arc exists as a singular landscape, a self-contained journey, while simultaneously contributing to a larger form whose contours gradually emerge over time.
The work never reveals itself all at once. It appears, disappears, and returns. It asks for time. Like a constellation whose stars illuminate one by one, Opening Arcs invites each listener to find their own path through its resonances. There is no prescribed beginning and no fixed destination; only possible trajectories, returns, detours, and discoveries.
At the heart of this adventure lies an object of almost archaic simplicity: the pendulum.
Suspended between earth and sky, it swings endlessly. Its motion is governed by an invisible force we all share: gravity. Here, this silent back-and-forth becomes a generator of time, a primordial breath to which the musicians attune themselves. The pendulums present in the performance space do not merely decorate the music; they move through it. They offer it a pulse, a breath, a horizon.
From this encounter emerges an idea both simple and vertiginous: to transform gravity into groove.
Gravity draws bodies toward the ground. Groove sets bodies in motion. Between these two forces, a music takes shape that does not seek to master time, but to accompany it. A music that listens to the world’s oscillations in order to discover rhythms, fragile balances, and unexpected impulses.
For Benoît Delbecq, this approach resonates deeply. His work has long explored the boundaries between structure and freedom, between rule and invention. In Opening Arcs, physical constraint becomes a source of openness. The laws of motion do not close possibilities; rather, they create a fertile terrain where improvisation can unfold with renewed freedom.
The compositions of Pendulum thus resemble living organisms. Patterns emerge, intersect, drift out of phase, and reconnect in new ways. Forms appear and dissolve. Nothing is fixed; everything is becoming. The music moves forward like a mobile suspended in space, carried by invisible forces whose traces it reveals.
One might hear in this project distant echoes of Steve Reich’s explorations of phase shifting, Conlon Nancarrow’s mechanical architectures, or György Ligeti’s temporal labyrinths. Yet Opening Arcs follows its own path: that of a music which does not merely represent a natural phenomenon, but inhabits it from within.
For ultimately, this work may not be about pendulums alone. It speaks of our way of being in the world. Of how we inhabit time, embrace its cycles, its returns, its slow transformations. It reminds us that movement is never a straight line, but a continuous oscillation between balance and imbalance, departure and return, tension and release.
Opening Arcs is an invitation to listen differently: to slow down, to follow curves rather than clocks, and to perceive in the swing of a pendulum something of our own presence within time. And perhaps, beneath every vibration, to hear this silent question: What becomes of music when gravity itself begins to improvise?
