There’s a familiar scale with eight tones (C-D flat-E flat-E natural-F sharp-G-A-B flat) that Scriabin often used. Yoshihiro Kanno employs it to the point where you can’t discern any significant distinctions between the five long piano works presented on this disc. They chiefly differ in that each piece has the pianist double on either a traditional Japanese instrument or play along with computer-generated sounds.

While the music is often static and overly long for what it has to say, the gorgeous sonorities, bold gestures and ingenious deployment of registers compensate and grab your attention. For example, A Particle of Light features kaleidoscopic scales moving at different tempi in each hand. A Particle of Rainbow concludes with massive two-handed chords and long, ecstatic trills. A toy piano provides effective melodic reinforcement in parts of Lunar Rainbow. Similar piano-writing fills up the six minutes of Angel’s Ladder. At this juncture the computer processing kicks in, expanding the piano sonorities and bending pitches. Kanno catches you off-guard when he tosses in the opening measures of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde Prelude, yet he soon returns to eight-note scale rhapsodising, sugar-coated with quasi spaceship effects.

Ironically, the shortest piece, Prelude for Angel, proves Kanno’s strongest offering. It begins with disarming melodic simplicity, then becomes dark and murky, building up to a shattering climax before returning to its gentle point of origin. No doubt that BIS’s luscious multichannel sound and Noriko Ogawa’s astonishingly proficient and colourful pianism make a better case for Kanno’s aesthetic than a 250-word review.