The formative moment in Daryl Groetsch’s development as an artist came when he was a kid and heard strange and unearthly music emanating from the family garage. It turned out to be his dad listening to the long-running New Age radio station “Hearts of Space,” and the moment stuck with the young Portlander. The music he’s made as Pulse Emitter over the last 20 years exudes an affection for the “contemplative music” championed by “Hearts of Space” DJ Stephen Hill, ranging from Berlin School synth music to the spacier work of West Coast mystics like Kevin Braheny and Iasos. In the process, Groetsch anticipated the pervasive influence of New Age on late ’00s/early ’10s noise by a few years, plundering old crystal-shop tapes for inspiration before I Am the Center was even a twinkle in Light in the Attic’s eye.
Fathoms is the latest in a string of synth albums the composer has made under his own name since 2022, and his first since relocating from Portland to the storied town of Salzburg, Austria. The music on the Daryl Groetsch Bandcamp page ranges from the remarkably subtle and stirring (Home Again, the first in the series) to the purely functional (the long-form sleep aid Blotted). Most of these albums are content to inhabit a single mood, but Fathoms is the first one with a defined arc: Each of its four long tracks takes us deeper into the ocean, until finally we’re swimming along the sunless sea floor.
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Fathoms functions in a similar role to a 1950s exotica album; while Martin Denny or Yma Sumac might invite listeners to visit a faraway land from the comfort of their chair, Groetsch transports us to the bottom of the sea without us having to worry about decompression sickness or how we’re going to breathe. Do I even need to tell you that track one glimmers with bright synth tones, track two is a little darker and more reflective, track three is a shadowy drone, and track four is a murky low-end abyss? It would be churlish to demand or expect anything else from Fathoms. Besides, Groetsch put out Tide Pools last year, which is as wonky and abstract a representation of coastal life as you could hope for, so it’s not like he’s incapable of conjuring the primeval wildness of the ocean rather than taking the listener for a submersible dive.
Fathoms is a frictionless listen, but there’s a stubborn sense of craft to it, and that’s what distinguishes it from the streaming-era onslaught of music with little purpose except to be pleasant. Groetsch is a classically trained composer with an ear for ambiguous chord resolutions, and his sound design is flawless for its purposes. There was a moment where a synth tone on “Radiant Stratum” shone with such a luster I could’ve sworn I was hearing Laraaji, and even the whoosh of tidal noise that opens “Dim Floor” sounds like it was crafted as lovingly as the perfectly calibrated white-noise tone on Blotted. Subtle touches like this let you know this music is a labor of love for Groetsch—that he’s still chasing the same awe he felt as a kid, hearing “Hearts of Space” from the garage.
