The history of electroacoustic music has a few well-worn narratives, some more reliable than others, with each in its own way embracing the revolution that electric sound production had on the course of music as we know it. One such tale is that of the increasing discretization of the smallest, controllable element of a sound wave into parts that are simultaneously concrete (irreducible) and fully expandable, through synthesis, and waveform modification. Frequency is the common denominator, and collects chromatic scale and sine wave oscillators under its umbrella. With this in mind, we should be able to give frequency expression to anything in the world, like, for example, the colours associated with that most ephemeral of elements, air.

Enter ambient minimalist extraordinaire, loscil (Scott Morgan) and Lawrence English, who set themselves the rather daunting task of giving voice to colours, most of which we actually hear better than see, though most would argue to the contrary. Taking as their source material a museum artifact from a pre-electronic past – the pipe organ – Morgan and English created something both refined and uncouth. Frequencies are left intact from field recordings of the room and the instrument playing in it, but their arcs (read: waveforms) have been manipulated in such a way that we hear something that doesn't sound very much like an organ at all. The attack and decay of the pipe organ is tricked by the duo into extended periods of droning, so that the sonic identity of the source material remains intact despite its processing and modulation on the other end. Things ultimately go from hazy to crazy on the transition, for example, between "Black" and "Pink" (each of the album's eight tracks features a different color name), where the actual weight of the frequencies registered begins to push and relax like the movement of an actual human organ (pun intended). 

Maybe the most striking element of this magisterial work is the degree to which it hews to a chromatic designation (the title of the album and each track therein) only to arrive at a form of music that is something much smaller and much bigger than anything in the 12-tone vocabulary. The work rewards many, many listens, which requires attention to subtle shifts in rhythm and expressivity that are anything but armchair music. I cannot recommend this highly enough. For fans of English or loscil's work, and those who rejoice in the effortlessness of something otherwise complex