Sprague, Emily A.: Cyano (sky blue vinyl) LP

In "Cyano", Emily A. Sprague builds an intricate world, expanding a sonic register that is both familiar and viscerally new, reflecting the synthesist and composer's internal register with mirrors to alternate realms. An arc of faithful gestures, "Cyano" is meditation on visibility, psychic transformation, light transmission, and worlds beyond our knowing. It revels in configurations of connective possibility, where shadow and vision meet incisive truth. In a pivotal moment of re-engaging film photography around 2019, Sprague became transfixed by cyanotypes and the work of Anna Atkins, a botanist and photographer who documented flowers through cyano methods. The emotional tenor of Atkins' images sparked narrative threads of a character who lived on a faraway planet, "Cyano" - once like Earth - destroyed by misunderstanding and forced into a pseudomutuality that eschewed individuality for assimilated symbiosis. Through "Cyano", Sprague seeks to find a sonic and environmental palette for what this world felt like: familiar yet utterly foreign, sounds that might seem like piano or guitar, but not quite; a continuum that bridges various relational territories - with self, other, ecology, and life in a distant world. On "Cyano", all sounds are synthesized, with no samples or acoustic instruments, and the record introduces singing into Sprague's previously instrumental works.