The name of Marvin Ayres was unfamiliar to me but his website (www.marvinayres.com) informs me that he has ‘composed and recorded a diverse selection of minimalist albums, incorporating spatial soundscapes and psycho acoustics and latterly for 5.1 Surround Sound, as well as produced a number of film soundtracks’.

‘Spatial landscape’ is indeed an apt description of the Harmogram Suite. Its overall harmonic stasis and washes and waves of sound, particularly in the first movement, ‘Underture’, suggest, at least to the modern film-influenced mind, nothing so much as space, or perhaps the lapping waves of an endless sea. The work is cast in six movements and is apparently overdubbed with 140 layers (all instruments played by the composer himself), with the addition of a choir in the fifth. The second and third movements build slowly up from a couple of notes, deploying to the full the emotive power associated with string instruments, while the fourth evokes a shadowy world clothed in near-Eastern colours. With the fifth we are taken into sonically luxuriant meditative territory – imagine a cross between Tavener and Vangelis – which is plausibly countered by the clean simplicity of the brief final movement, ‘Lament’.

In addition to the CD, there is a DVD containing the work accompanied by images of a transistor valve, slowly changing colours; two very short films with music by Ayres; and a live performance of Soured Alchemy – all similarly slow in tempo and static in harmony. For aficionados.