David Granström - 2019 - A Distant Color, Secluded

 

XKatedral – XK16

A distant color is already a paradox. Color normally announces itself through immediate visibility, while distance weakens it, and seclusion removes it from view altogether. David Granström builds this album inside that contradiction. Its synthesized tones are exact, carefully tuned and governed by repeating structures, yet the result does not feel clinical or diagrammatic. Chords appear as luminous objects suspended far beyond reach, approaching with such gradual changes of density that the listener may notice the surrounding space transforming before recognizing what has moved. The music does not illustrate an imaginary landscape. It creates the perceptual conditions under which distance, horizon, depth and color begin behaving like audible materials.

“The Other Side” serves as a brief crossing rather than a formal introduction. In a little over two minutes, clustered tones establish a harmonic world that seems complete even as it remains partially concealed. The piece feels less like entering a room than discovering that the room has always extended beyond the wall in front of you. “Approaching the Horizon” then begins testing the title’s impossible motion. A horizon can be approached indefinitely but never reached because it moves with the observer. Granström’s cycles operate similarly: each return seems to bring the listener closer to some central chord or final alignment, yet the apparent destination keeps reorganizing itself. Repetition generates movement without requiring the material to travel in a straight line.

“Plane at Infinity” enlarges this illusion of spatial music. In geometry, a plane at infinity allows parallel directions to meet beyond ordinary measurable space; Granström’s tones seem to pursue an equivalent acoustic condition. Separate harmonic strands rise, overlap and acquire shared overtones until the distinction between individual notes becomes less important than the larger field they produce together. The sound can be bright without becoming weightless. Deep frequencies hold the upper tones in place, giving the music a gravitational center while fine harmonic activity flickers across its surface. What appears minimal from a distance becomes crowded with internal motion when heard closely, as though a smooth block of color contains innumerable smaller shades that only emerge after the eyes have adjusted.

Granström constructed these pieces algorithmically, but the listener never needs to admire the machinery from outside. Rules, patterned cycles, chance operations and precise tuning function as hidden supports rather than the subject displayed in the foreground. This distinction matters because computer-generated music can easily become a demonstration of process, asking the audience to appreciate the intelligence of its design more than the experience of its sound. A Distant Color, Secluded reverses that relationship. The rigor exists to produce immersion. Its structures are exact enough to remain stable while perception becomes unstable, allowing the listener to lose track of which tones are actually changing and which only appear altered because something around them has shifted.

The twenty-five-minute “Waning Moon” occupies more than half the album and gradually absorbs everything preceding it. A waning moon diminishes visibly while remaining physically whole, and the piece repeatedly plays with this difference between appearance and existence. Harmonic masses brighten, thin, retreat and return in altered proportions, while low tones make the entire construction feel as though it is slowly rotating rather than progressing toward a climax. The long duration allows intensity to accumulate without conventional drama. Nothing needs to explode because sustained attention magnifies each change. A new overtone can open the music like a window; a slight darkening can make the same chord appear suddenly remote; a low-frequency arrival can alter the scale of everything above it.

There is something medieval in Granström’s use of proportion and tuning, but nothing antiquarian in the sound. He takes old principles concerning number, interval and recurring measure and places them inside real-time digital synthesis, connecting eras that are often treated as opposites. Medieval music could understand harmony as evidence of an underlying cosmic order; modern electronic composition can expose sound as measurable frequency, algorithm and electrical event. A Distant Color, Secluded permits both understandings to coexist. Its tones are mathematical relationships, but they are also sensory experiences capable of creating wonder before their construction is understood.

The title’s final word may be the most important. This distant color is secluded, not absent. The music suggests that entire perceptual worlds can exist nearby without becoming available until the listener adopts the right scale of attention. Granström does not drag those worlds into ordinary focus or explain their internal laws. He allows them to remain partially withdrawn, revealing enough structure for the ear to sense their size while preserving the distance that gives them power. By the end of “Waning Moon,” listening has changed from observing an object to remaining inside a field. The album has not carried us to the other side, the horizon or infinity. It has made those unreachable places briefly audible from here.