Doug Aitken is one of the defining image-makers of his generation - an artist who has projected film across the facade of the Museum of Modern Art, sent a sculpture across the United States in the form of a moving train, and was awarded the International Prize at the 1999 Venice Biennale for an installation called electric earth. Lightscape is something quieter and stranger: a song cycle, built almost entirely from the human voice, that became the seed of his most ambitious work to date.

It began when the Los Angeles Master Chorale invited Aitken to collaborate. Instead of a conventional sung narrative, he wanted something hyper-minimal - short words and broken phrases, repeating until they cloud over into abstraction, closer to thought patterns than to lyrics. Working with the Chorale's artistic director, the Grammy-winning conductor Grant Gershon, he wrote the cycle heard here. From those recordings the rest of Lightscape grew: a feature-length film, a multi-screen installation, and live performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic that travelled from a premiere at Walt Disney Concert Hall to the Marciano Art Foundation and New York's Shed. This record is where it all began - the music as its own self-contained world.

The voice is the whole substance of the album. A single line emerges, intimate and exposed, then multiplies into a chorus of more than fifty singers before thinning back to one. Producers Austin Meredith and Rodaidh McDonald collage these vocal sessions into something restless and contemporary, looping and dissolving the singing over synthetic textures and steady electronic pulses. The record holds two temperatures at once: the human warmth of massed voices, and the cool, kinetic drive of the machine running beneath them.

The method - plain language repeated until meaning gives way to pattern - reaches straight back to the American minimalists: the phasing of Steve Reich, the cells of Philip Glass, and above all the wordless vocal abstraction of Meredith Monk, all of whom appear elsewhere within the wider Lightscape project. Aitken bends that inheritance toward his own long preoccupation - the accelerating, screen-lit expanse of the American West, and the questions of where exactly we are and where we are going. The songs circle those questions without ever quite resolving them.

Issued by The Vinyl Factory in a limited edition of 500, pressed on blue vinyl and housed in an embossed, gloss-finished sleeve, Lightscape lifts the song cycle out of the dark, surround-sound chamber of the installation and returns it to the most private form of listening - one voice, one room, one record. A rare chance to hold the music of a major moving-image work in the hand. Recommended.