Garment, the opening track, is somehow based on a textile design. This, like many of Alva Noto’s techno-oriented pieces, centres on a severely regular rhythm conjured by his trademark sub bass, short static blasts and micro-glitch snares. This often brings to mind playful television clips of a factory at work where each activity on the production line has its own signature sound combining to knit an industrial beat. Meanwhile, a sonorous, extended tone fills the gaps, rippling like silk falling off the mill.

Turning our attention to the properties of light, Sonolumi (first released as part of Line’s Camera Lucida DVD) is named after sonoluminescence, an effect first observed in the thirties where light is briefly produced when intense sound waves cause bubbles in a liquid to burst, potentially revealing a source of alternative energy. The track itself sounds like a tunnel of light forming around a comatose patient in hospital thanks to the combination of a steady, cold bleep and the circling coruscations of warm celestial tones that ultimately overcome the clinical ambience as the soul leaves the body.

Perhaps most explicit of all in its journey from sight to sound is Nicolai’s short piece recorded from the ANS synthesiser, dedicated to its inventor Evgeny Murzin. Its antiquated, dusty electronics provide relief from Alva Noto’s usual digital regimen as it converts one of Nicolai’s images into its own signature shiver and pulse.

Such sinister results of this Russian synthesiser were previously exploited by composer Eduard Artemyev particularly in Andrei Tarkovsky’s films but it is the director and not the composer to whom ‘For 2’s Stalker is dedicated, named after his film describing a hopeful journey into a forbidden zone promising fulfilment in an otherwise dystopian existence. Nicolai’s palette is perfect for painting a panorama of paranoia consistent with the film’s premise. A rumbling bass is combined with sine waves whose pulses speed and slow like the revolutions of a searchlight attempting to pick out illegal emigrants. Surprisingly a Russian voice appears midway providing a rare but welcome organic component to the mix.

The album closes with a second version of ‘Argonaut’ (the original appearing earlier on) dedicated to the German dramatist Heiner Müller, this time arranged for orchestral instrumentation by Max Knoth. On balance, this is perhaps the most triumphant yet accessible moment on the album, where Nicolai’s digital schema is accurately redeployed across strings, brass, xylophone and percussion. The overtones from simple four note refrains collide both consonantly and dissonantly in precise cycles, just as the original, but this time the human gestures underpinning the tones breathe life into the original’s repetitions.

Nicolai’s work can seem intimidating as much for the industrious quantity of projects as for their academic qualities always poised in the interceding areas of sound and vision. But whereas his exhibited work can be immediate and self-evident in describing relationships between the senses – from patterns on the surface of milk created by a specific sonic frequency (as displayed on ‘For 2’s cover) or unique sound events triggered by the formation of snow crystals – his recorded work can feel initially clinical and sterile. But just like these installations, the sounds are based on controlled processes that generate patterns whose repetitions reveal idiosyncrasies amid the synchrony that provide delightful details. ‘For 2’ manages to showcase a wide range of results from such processes, providing a handy primer to Alva Noto’s sound world and its influences.