Tip! ** Edition of 70 ** On Cyan Music, Atte Elias Kantonen sets out to answer a deceptively simple question: what happens when shimmer and sheen – qualities usually belonging to light – are reimagined as pure sound. Across eight pieces he uses radiant, meticulously sculpted synthesis to build a world where timbre behaves like reflective surfaces, refracting and scattering in ways that feel almost tangible. Rather than leaning on obvious ambient tropes, he treats each track as a small laboratory for testing how texture, density and movement can make audio feel luminous, slippery, or finely grained. Based in Helsinki and working between sound art, composition and sound design, Kantonen has long used sound to probe what might be called the material imagination: how our ears conjure the idea of “stuff” – glass, metal, ice, fabric – from abstract vibrations alone. On Cyan Music, his tracks present transient aural images, outlines of substance and texture that faintly recall materials we know without ever settling into literal depiction. These are speculative forms rather than denotative simulations, leaving space for the listener’s own perception to colour in, rotate and re‑shape them. As the album unfolds, it gently destabilises the processes by which our minds decide what “matter” is, suggesting that materiality is as much an act of listening as of seeing or touching.

The source material for these explorations was synthesized and recorded at EMS in Stockholm between 2024 and 2025, a context that shows in the precision and depth of the sound field. Back in Helsinki, Kantonen further treated and “alchemised” this palette, coaxing from it blurs, edges and resonances that feel uncannily physical. Opener Ü is wrapped in a twinkling substance that seems at once metallic and icy, hovering in a state between solid and liquid, as if the sound itself were undergoing a phase transition in slow motion. Waiting To Get A Bow In revolves around what could be the tone of a hypothetical string instrument – warm, slightly woody – but the way overtones bloom and high frequencies glint around it feels more like light hitting a curved surface than anything a conventional instrument would produce. EEEE, with its constantly warping contours, suggests a mirage in audio form: hints of shape appear, begin to harden, then slip away again before the ear can fully grasp them.

The title Cyan Music came only once the pieces were complete, crystallising how Kantonen hears the material he’s been working with. Cyan, for him, embodies a set of dualities – natural yet synthetic, pure yet processed, gleaming yet inherently unsteady. The music mirrors this: there is a kind of cool clarity to the sounds, but also an instability in how they refract and overlap, as if each layer were always on the verge of changing state. That sense of poised unease is crucial to the album’s character; it’s what keeps these meticulously shaped textures from becoming mere exercises in sound design. Beneath the surface play of timbre, Cyan Music is quietly underpinned by a subtle, often ghostly melodicism. In Cutlery On The Beach, slow‑moving motifs swell under a top layer of digital rustles, like distant harmonic shadows cast by tiny, pointillist movements. Wailing Armor drapes elegiac chordal movements and an almost birdlike line over a graceful, hovering drift, turning what could have been a purely textural study into something with a clear emotional contour. Throughout, Kantonen hints at melody more than he states it outright, letting fragments rise and sink within the mass of sound, which gives the album a synaesthetic quality: as phrases brush past, they seem to carve shapes and contours in mid‑air.

What Cyan Music ultimately offers is not a fixed landscape but a zone for perceptual play. Kantonen builds from micro‑details outward, unearthing a kind of latent vibrancy inside seemingly inanimate, synthetic substances. Grain, shimmer and sheen accumulate into forms that feel fully material without ever being tied to a specific object. Yet this rich world of otherworldly matter isn’t presented as an endpoint or a sealed environment; it’s a spark. By surrounding us in sheens, shimmers and carefully calibrated instabilities, his compositions invite our imaginations to take over – to inhabit, test and reconfigure these sonic substances as if they were things we could touch, tilt, and hold up to the light.