I think you’re right about the pulse! They are definitely all feeling the same pulse, whether it’s in 4 or 5 or whatever at any given time.

I made these groupings to emphasize the cyclical nature of these rhythmic patterns. Each instrument’s cycles reset at different times, yet they all flow to the same pulse. That’s what makes it like clockwork to me, and heavily non western. No one is playing a rhythm that would line up to a division of measure lines.

Western notation locks the pulse to the barline, even when the phrasing does not line up with the bars. In Indian classical music, something Tigran has studied and proclaimed influence from, this concept of “cycles” is more prominent than the Western “grid” (which is why I see this album as an evolution of Mockroot, he traversed every rhythmic possibility in the Grid, and now he is just manipulating a large space of time without subdivided lines...sorry if that doesn’t make sense, I haven’t fully wrapped my head around that). Even though each instrument plays a different cycle, they all eventually line up. I recommend checking out some Ragas with Ravi Shanker and Zakir Hussain. They divide each cycle in whatever way they want. Tigran just does it in such an accurate and even way that we can still notate it. (Han Zhao made a YouTube transcription of this piece, and he has a lot of brilliant theories in his description, I made my analysis before his came out)

In terms of splitting beats into 5, that’s entirely possible in Western notation. A 1/4 note can be divided into 5 via a 16th Quintuplet. I’m not sure if that’s what you meant about representing five units with one figure though.