With music we can listen to time passing. It reveals the mechanisms of attention, how it shapes our experience – widening and narrowing the horizon of time. My aim is to design the experience of time with sound.

I aspire to find beauty in strange, otherworldly sounds, to expose their inner world, and through their unfolding – to reveal the nature of time. Each timbre – a carefully crafted jewel – is sequenced to create a space for lingering. Drawing from improvised music, contemporary classical, and folk traditions, I use formal processes, microtonality, cyclic forms, and ritualistic structures to create something that exists between worlds.

I want listeners to feel like they're enveloped in sound, participating in a ritual that's alien yet welcoming. The music should create a hunger for presence, for lingering in the moment.

Edgars Cīrulis (b. 1996) is a Latvian composer and pianist whose work explores time as the primary compositional material. Drawing from gamelan structures, microtonality, and ritualistic forms, he creates immersive sonic experiences that reveal the elasticity of temporal perception.

His music has been performed by the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra, the State Choir "Latvija," Latvian Radio Bigband and Trio Tresensus, under conductors including Māris Sirmais and Julien Masmondet, and by soloists including Agnese Egliņa, Ieva Saliete, and Aigars Raumanis. His works have been presented at the Usedomer Musikfestival in Germany and at festivals in Denmark, Norway, and the United Kingdom, and he has collaborated with musicians including Mark Dresser and Andrew Downing.

Recent works include Time (chamber ensemble), Love Itself (choir, solo voice and percussion, commissioned by the State Choir "Latvija"), It Unfolds (piano), and Time is Another River (orchestra). In 2026 he founded the ensemble Maģiskais Reālisms, dedicated to performing his music at the intersection of composed precision and improvised spontaneity; its first work, TRUTH — a modular composition for open instrumentation and percussionist — was recorded and filmed in 2026 with director Ildze Felsberga.

As a pianist, Cīrulis premieres his own solo music, including the programme Imaginarium. He curated Brīvās Mūzikas Māja in Riga, an eleven-concert series with invited artists.

In 2020 he was nominated for Young Musician of the Year at the Latvian Grand Music Award. In 2025 he received the Composition Department New Creation Award from the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music, and in 2026 the "Kilograms Kultūras" award with the State Choir "Latvija" for the concert "Es zinu, kā roze plaukst," as well as the Tālivaldis Ķeniņš Award.

Cīrulis studied at the Royal Academy of Music in Aalborg with Søren Møller and received a master's degree in composition from the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music, where he studied with Krists Auznieks. He has also studied composition with Marcos Balter, Edmund Finnis, and Bent Sørensen.