Pendulum (Benoît Delbecq, Jonas Westergaard & Peter Bruun) - Opening Arcs 1-8 (Ilk Music, 2026)

By Eyal Hareuveni

Pendulum is a singular piano trio featuring French pianist Benoît Delbecq with Danish double bass player Jonas Westergaard and drummer Peter Bruun (both Westergaard and Bruun have collaborated before with fellow Danish pianist Søren Kjærgaard). Bruun initiated this trio in 2024 as part of his ambitious research project exploring new approaches to musical time (Multitemporal movement and embodiment through Rhythmic Design at The Danish National Academy of Music).

The Pendulum trio investigates all aspects of this classic format, including the most basic sensibilities of space and time, avoiding rigid structures, allowing instead for balance, elegance and fluidity. It challenges us to listen to its music as resonant arcs or shared fields of presence rather than defined by linear time, and explores new ways to transform free improvisation gravity into groove. Delbeq suggested that the trio will play with the presence of physical pendulums on stage, symbolizing the elasticity of time and giving a sense of pulse. These oscillating bodies guide the subtle, cyclical shifts in the music, which, paradoxically, feels familiar: music that sways and breathes, while finding rhythm in the inevitability of motion.

The trio releases its eight-volume EP series, Arcs, nearly three hours of music, in a monthly release cycle that began in May and will conclude in December 2026. These Arcs offer Pendulum’s idiosyncratic, enigmatic, lyrical universe, in which metric relations, shifting balances, and elastic phrasing are woven together in a kaleidoscopic manner. Each volume swings on its own terms, with no intention to offer a linear narrative, and uses distinct compositional fragments, notated and graphic scores. But the whole project accumulates into an open body of work that allows us to feel how time bends, breathes, and searches for an elusive balance. The Pendulum trio invites listeners to form their own path through the eight volumes and discover different insights and relations in their own time.

Arc No. 1 

Pendulum describes this volume: “Time leans before it moves. Motion unfolds patiently, stretching and rebounding with quiet elasticity. What propels the arc is not force but attentiveness, which allows duration to bend and return without breaking. Each swing carries clarity and restraint, revealing time as something more shaped than measured”.

The trio suggests sparse, deep listening, labyrinthine architectures with patient and subtle, cyclical-rhythmic shifts, best captured in the aptly titled, 17-minute minimalist “Exercice Elastique”, that patiently gravitates into a most delicate, vulnerable, quite irreverent groove.

Arc No. 2

“Afterwards appears before it is recognized. Movement writes itself into space, leaving subtle traces that guide listening rather than direction. Rhythms form paths, both adaptable and responsive, where perception stretches between memory and anticipation. The arc remains fluid, shaped by change rather than arrival”.

Pendulum sketches an almost abstract, empty map, from which it begins to imagine possible contours and paths, and how to find its inner, spatial logic, and its subtle rhythmic shifts, finally realized on “Plasticity”.

Arc No. 3

“Movement turns inward. Each gesture is weighted, deliberate, and reduced to necessity. Time thickens as motion slows, inviting attention to settle inside the smallest shifts. The arc transforms discreetly, as intensity is held beneath restraint. Balance is discovered through presence, not display”.

The 31-minute “Buto” corresponds with the hyper-slow and hyper-controlled motion of the Japanese avant-dance theatre, Butō (舞踏), that resists and fixated conception of time. Pendulum’s fragile balance was realized through an austere, cryptic, and often almost silent presence that keeps triggering our imagination, and not by technical display or mastery.

Arc No. 4

“Wooden time moves with grain and resistance. Motion creaks, sways, and negotiates its own structure. Oscillation becomes tactile, shaped by friction and patience. The arc holds multiple possibilities at once, allowing form and freedom to coexist without resolution. The rings of time are both counted and counting”.

The trio focuses on its essence, the ever-negotiated arcs that blur the distinction between form and freedom, and question our conception of linear time, turning it into a spiritual riddle, a kōan.

Arc No. 5

 “A phase shifts nearly unnoticed. Motion lightens, stepping carefully through softened contours. Layers thin and overlap, revealing phrasing where gestures begin and fade. The arc listens closely to its own balance, finding meaning in nuance rather than emphasis. The push and pull are their own reason for being”.

Pendulum refines its fragile, nuanced equilibrium with melodic threads that patiently, hesitantly flirt with familiar, playful, and resonant piano trio dynamics.

 Arc No. 6 (to be released on October 10)

“Momenta accumulate through return. Motion becomes practiced, framed by shared gravity and memory. Energy circulates without urgency, shaped by repetition and transformation. The past is present and future at once”.

A further, urgent, cyclical rhythmic refinement is offered, faithfully captured in the short pieces “Arc” and “Dance”, shaped by nuanced repetitions and transformations.

Arc No. 7 (to be released on November 9)

“Time folds into itself. Multiple cycles coexist, asymmetrical yet connected. Movement breathes across layered durations, allowing contradiction to remain unresolved. The arc sustains density without weight, continuity without uniformity. Listening is wide enough to hold all the all of it”.

Pendulum’s music plays a touch-and-go game in its own fragmented musical continuum, sustaining density without weight, continuity without uniformity, but with more structural focus.

 Arc No. 8 (to be released on December 9)

“Strange tools reveal their logic through use. Motion disperses, leaving resonance rather than momentum. What remains feels everywhere at once, absorbed into space and attention. The arc settles without closing, as stillness carries the last trace of movement forward. It is the beginning of the end and the end of the beginning”.

The concluding volume is not an end to this fascinating journey but a sort of beginning. The Pendulum trio already inhabited its own elastic conception of time, as the devoted listeners to this journey, and has established its idiosyncratic language. But Pendulum’s music tells us something deeper about life and the inevitable changes we experience throughout life. This trio asks us to adapt our time sensibility to its subtle transformations, fully embrace and be deeply attuned to our own ubiquitous cyclical and oscillating arcs, as we move forward, attempting to maintain an elusive balance.