On Cyan Music, Atte Elias Kantonen wields radiant and richly detailed synthesis to explore how two typically optical qualities, shimmer and sheen, might be transmuted into audio.
The Helsinki, Finland based sonic artist, sound designer and composer uses sound to explore the material imagination. His tracks present transient aural images, outlines of substance, matter and texture reminiscent of those found in the world around us. But they’re speculative rather than denotive or evocative, affording space for our imaginations to colour in, shape and rotate. Destabilising and rerouting the processes that make matter matter in our minds.
Source materials for Cyan Music’s eight tracks were synthesized and recorded at Stockholm’s EMS studios between 2024 and 2025, with Kantonen further sculpting, treating and alchemising the palette of sounds. Opener “Ü” is shrouded in a twinkling substance equal parts metallic and icy, solid and liquid. “Waiting To Get A Bow In” sounds like it’s played on a hypothetical stringed instrument. Around its warm timbre curious overtones and high frequencies emerge, an audio equivalent to light glinting and sparking off a surface. The constantly warping “EEEE” suggests a flickering mirage, form solidifying and then escaping. The album’s title came once the music was finished, reflecting the dualities Kantonen perceives in cyan – natural and unnatural, pure and affected. “Cyan is a gleaming hue, emitting a peaceful appearance but still unsteady in its essence,” he relates.
Cyan Music is underpinned by a gorgeous, subtle melodicism. Ghostly slow-moving motifs swell beneath “Cutlery On The Beach”‘s digital rustles. Elegiac chords and an almost avian tune interpolate “Wailing Armor”‘s graceful drift. It all combines into a compelling, synaesthesia inducing quality. As sounds pass through your ears, they start to have shapes and surfaces.
Cyan Music places us in a sonically rich world of coruscating otherworldly materials. It builds from the details up to unearth the vibrancy that resides in the inanimate, and the fully-fledged materiality that can be implied by sound. But this world of synthetic substances isn’t an endpoint, it’s a spark. Kantonen’s richly detailed compositions surround us in sheens and shimmers and offer our imaginations room to explore their curious actions.
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi
Artwork & Design by incepBOY
Words by Daryl Worthington
Supported by the Kone Foundation
