In 2010, Jonathan Jones, an art critic for the Guardian, reflected on the work of prolific German artist Gerhard Richter in a short article. Commenting on his experience of first encountering Richter's ‘Cage (1–6)’, a series of six massive abstract paintings – the artist's homage to American composer John Cage – Jones recounts, ‘… it was like going from a claustrophobic interior into an expansive parkland where distant city lights flicker on half-frozen ponds. These paintings are liberating and time-freezing, sombre and ecstatic’. Jones, in his wonderfully evocative imagery, unknowingly struck a chord with Irish composer Jonathan Nangle who, a year later, was setting out to compose a work for solo violin and electronic resonators. Using language from Jones’ descriptive account as a title, where distant city lights flicker on half-frozen ponds tellingly became the first track of Jonathan Nangle's debut album Pause, newly released on Ergodos records in July.

Featuring superb performances, fittingly full of clarity, transparency, and an admirable attention to detail, Pause is a testament to the artistry of Ireland's Crash Ensemble – and specifically their string section. With six chamber works for strings that span the last decade of Nangle's artistic output, Pause is also a revealing portrait of the composer. Out of the selected works emerge threads that tie the album together. Among them is Nangle's penchant for textures of repeated and overlapping patterns. Another is his reference to music of the past.

Looking back at Jonathan Jones’ review with this latter thread in mind, we see a series of connections. From Cage to Richter, Richter to Jones, and Jones to Nangle, this chain of associations points to a deeper connection between Nangle and Cage bubbling beneath the surface of where distant city lights flicker on half-frozen ponds. In the years 1946–50 Cage adopted principles of Indian philosophy, and in notable works like his Six Melodies (1950) and String Quartet in Four Parts (1949–50) he set out to ‘sober and quiet the mind thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences’ – a spiritually tinged modus operandi that Cage borrowed from his student (and in turn, teacher) Gita Sarabhai. To achieve this detached and calming aesthetic, works from this period often employ what Cage called ‘gamuts’ or cells of highly limited yet unrelated melodic and harmonic material, engaged using specific repeating rhythmic structures closely tied to the concept of the Indian tala. While Cage described himself as no longer interested in expressing specific feelings and ideas in his music using traditional functional progression, he nonetheless employed tonally suggestive material in his gamuts. These works thus have a built-in tension between the tonal allusions suggested by the irregularly placed and overlapping patterns of gamuts and the lush harmonies that arise out of them, despite their lack of a clear intentional functional harmonic development.

Jonathan Nangle's music featured on Pause plays with similar tensions. Of his My heart stopped a thousand beats, a slowly unfurling piece sensitively performed by Lisa Dowdall on viola and Kate Ellis on cello, Nangle writes, ‘my aim was to create complexity through simple conglomeration, in this instance just using six notes. The pattern seems simple on the page; the complexity reveals itself in performance’. Along with Where distant city lights flicker on half-frozen ponds, My heart stopped a thousand beats features a detached, floating quality brought on by the cyclical use of small tonally suggestive melodic, harmonic and rhythmic motives similar to Cage's gamuts. These patterns, rather than leading to anywhere in a traditional narrative sense, seem to spin around, picking up speed, and stalling out before materialising into something more. Nangle, like Cage, conjures a vast meditative sonic landscape void of direct expression by employing slowly evolving textures of open strings and harmonics and by instructing his players to play senza vibrato, sul tasto, and in the case of My heart stopped a thousand beats to produce a ‘white, pale sound’. But these works, while revolving around a Cageian aesthetic and compositional method rich with possibility never fully come into their own, failing to build substantially upon the fertile grounds that were earlier established.

These two works are bookended by two minute-long improvisations Fragment I & II scored for violin, viola, cello and double bass. Both act as a sort of aural sorbet to cleanse the pallet between the album's larger works, but similarly leave the listener wistfully wanting more. Formed as improvisations on excerpts from the title track Pause, these two fragments offer only a tantalising glimpse into a perhaps more sprawling landscape.

Pause, also for violin, viola, cello and double bass, uses a two-bar phrase from the third movement of American composer Charles Ives’ behemoth Concord Sonata as its starting point. Nangle, who again draws upon a web of historical associations for inspiration writes that ‘this connecting thread stretches back to the early twentieth century and is filtered through my twenty-first-century imagination’. Originally written as the sonic component of a video installation, Pause subjects the Charles Ives fragment to a sequence of rearrangements, cyclical patterns, repetitions and ruptures over the course of the nearly 10-minute piece (the longest track on the disc). This work despite its repetitive treatment of the Ives excerpt, avoids adopting an Ivesian aesthetic, and seems more conventional in its formal development, growing to more predictable peaks and valleys of activity.

The final track on this release, Tessellate, is most unlike the others. Scored for solo cello and electronics, the work is fast-paced and uses a highly rhythmic sonic vocabulary in the electronic part, reminiscent of glitch music. As opposed to where distant city lights flicker on half-frozen ponds where the electronic resonators are subtle in their reinforcing of the solo violin's line, the electronics in Tessellate rise up, becoming a dominating force in opposition to the cello. This work, like the others on the disc, is based on layered repeating patterns of material. But in this case, the patterns are perhaps less obvious to the ear.

Nangle describes the act of composing as ‘threading a narrative through sound’. But beyond the more surface level feature of recurring intertwining patterns, Nangle more accurately threads narratives through history – drawing connections through works of the past via direct quotations and embedded aesthetic allusions. Within Jonathan Jones’ words Nangle by chance stumbled upon a remarkably precise description of his own work, on display on this new release: ‘time-freezing, somber and ecstatic’.