music release
Empty Cloud (2025)
12 hours, 15 minutes and 7 seconds of minimalist background music.
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An enormous cycle of minimalist, ambient background music composed in 48 parts, spanning 12 hours, taking you on a peaceful stroll around the circle of fifths. Released by Exformal Records. To read more and listen to the release, go here.
The music of Empty Cloud was written and composed specifically to be played in the background in a room, quietly, or at least ideally at a barely audible volume. It’s music that’s just there, plain and simple, and if you forget about it, it’s fine, don’t worry, it will let itself be known when it needs to.
The large-scale 12-hour structure of the release is broken down into smaller one-hour cycles with four parts in each of them, each composed of minimalist melodies pacing slowly through time at a sloth-like tempo. With everything constrained to different pentatonic scales (changing between each part of the release), a certain aimlessness ensures that the direction of the wandering notes is one of no direction at all — circular or maze-like even.
Amid long stretches of silence, notes appear almost as if an anomaly. There is a breaking point in these spacings between notes – if the notes come one after the other, they naturally sound as if belonging together. If there is a large space between two such clusters, they will appear as two different melodies. These melodies trace out a shape. Now, this shape is easy to imagine – and we probably do so automatically – when the notes in the melodies are close to one another, but what happens if we stretch them out so that they reach a breaking point where the listener does not have a chance of keeping track of the shape, simply because the time between each event is so large? Does it even matter?
Well, this is what I’ve tried to do in Empty Cloud: Reach that breaking point, stay there for a long time, and see what happens. Maybe nothing happens, and maybe that’s a good thing.
– Mads Kjeldgaard, Taastrup, Denmark, 2025
⁂
About the release
Empty Cloud is released digitally as high quality audio files and streaming via Exformal Records, as well as a limited edition physical release in the form of a bag of tea that may help the listener stay sharp throughout the cycle of the music. The tea itself is a so-called zenbucha (全部茶 meaning “everything tea”) from the Japanese tea farm Kamo Shizen Nōen in Kamo, Kyoto, Japan. This type of tea consists of leaves from the farm’s tea plants but also includes the weeds surrounding these, seen here as part of a whole. The tea was kindly imported by io.
Media
Music video
Interview about the process
The Lake Radio interviewed me about the process of making Empty Cloud. How I made my way from a dark room with tea as my entry point to the world, to finally composing in a new and slower way.
Supported by
Part of longterm project Exformal Records
Exformal Records is a platform for experimental music, sounds and listening practices.
Part of longterm project Algo-Generative Music Composition
Algo-Generative Music is what I call my practice of composing using a combination of maths, probabilities, or numeric rules, often organised in patterns reminiscent of weaving recipes. It's an ongoing project exploring what musical possibilities might emerge when we abstract musical expressions into relative instruction sets, numbers and data to allow the creation of ever-evolving figures and structures in time and harmony.
Hyphal (2025)
Algorithmic music for a computer-controlled pipe organ, celebrating life.
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Life in the Quiet Zone (2025)
An audio essay about the so-called quiet zone in the Copenhagen S-train system.
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Moans and Groans (2025)
The forest is a sex toy: Recreating the wind in the trees through a series of sound sculptures with vibrator motors.
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Empty Cloud (2025)
12 hours, 15 minutes and 7 seconds of minimalist background music.
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Title: Empty Cloud Part 8
MP3: /audio/music/emptycloudpart8.mp3
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Space In Between (2024)
Slow ambient piano looping with the window open and the outside world seeping in.
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Internal Organs (2023)
A 4 channel interactive installation for virtual organs.
Musik for virtuelle orgler (2023)
A release of algorithmic organ music for virtual organs on SuperPang.
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Title: Har Mødt En (Met someone)
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Death Told So Clearly To Fuck Off (2022)
Ambisonic (3D audio) piece for speaker domes.
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Title: Binaural rendition of 'Death Told So Clearly To Fuck Off'
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Singularity: Music for a dance performance (2022)
Interactive sounds and music for solo dancer Külli Roosna.
Akkorder (2020)
Algorithmic music CD release on Ambitious Tapes.
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Computer Music Journal, Volume 44, Issue 4 - Space as instrument (MIT) (2020)
Feature in MIT's Computer Music Journal.
Hold Time (2020)
Algorithmic music release on SuperPang.
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Title: Track 2 from 'Hold Time'
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I Solens Flint 1000 Floder (2019)
Ambisonic (3D audio) piece for speaker domes, commissioned by NOTAM and Ultima Festival.
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Title: Binaural rendition of 'I Solens Flint 1000 Floder'
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Hollow Body Timbals (2018)
Field recordings of cicadas. CD released by FLUF.
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Title: Track 1 from 'Hollow Body Timbals'
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Else Marie Pade 'Samlede tekster' (2017)
A book collecting all texts written by the Danish composer Else Marie Pade.
Music for Power Supplies (2017)
Drones based on electromagnetic recordings of studio power supplies. Released by Co-Dependent.
Spatial remixes of classic electronic music (2019-2021)
Classic pieces remixed in ambisonics for speaker domes and sound diffusion systems.
Sværm: Båndmagasinet (The Lake) (2019)
Harmonic drone piece released as part of the Tape Magazine by The Lake/Resonans Recs.
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States of Emergency (2018)
Electroacoustic music, released by Conditional Records.
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