… Morphogenèse, featuring music by Swedish composer Erik Nyström. Permeating all five pieces on this disc is an overt sense of evolution, as though the music was changing shape and manner in real-time as we listen. In Latitudes, everything begins from a simple bell strike, its resonance (which, although not always obviously, remains throughout) leading to a plethora of developments that, parallel to the notion of evolution, also suggest a sense of moving ever closer to something, in the process discerning increasing amounts of surface detail. The rather gorgeous sheen of this piece makes the effect hypnotic, but in works like Far-From-Equilibrium and Catabolisms Nyström’s concern is with sounds altogether more granular and fragmented. Yet these are moulded and compacted into startlingly present episodes where the music, bristling with organic energy, appears to muscle its way beyond the confines of the loudspeakers. Lucent Voids, at 20 minutes the longest work on the disc, makes both the deepest and most long-lasting impression. It could be heard as a synthesis or a summation of the other four works, embracing granular textures, extended pitch resonances, burly inner movement and gradual transitions of forms. But it transcends all of this, Nyström constructing a vast dramatic canvas that begins in the depths, passing through a hectic interplay of pitch and noise, and a number of increasingly vertiginous high points, to a place of genuine grandiosity, enveloping us in layer upon layer of highly variegated seams of material, dissipating into something resembling the crackle of vinyl mixed with an excited Geiger counter drenched by falling rain. Absolutely breathtaking.