Fundamental Colours by Lynette Sandholm Evvers

First in a planned series of recordings from the archive of Lynette Sandholm Evvers, who produced a substantial body of work over a 20 year period. A lifelong synesthete, she began working with electronically generated sound in the late 1980s as a means of exploring her chromesthesia; a condition in which certain tones and timbres induce particularly vivid colour hallucinations. Never intended for public dissemination, OFoCL have managed to persuade the Evvers estate to release these recordings because we believe they deserve to be heard by the widest possible audience.

The recordings on Fundamental Colours, and in particular Photism (6), showcase her experimentation with FM synthesis, involving the slow timbral modulation of simple harmonic structures to produce a deeply hypnotic effect. The music presented here has been reproduced by carefully migrating the midi data from her original compositions into a digital workspace, allowing for the best possible fidelity and lowest signal-to-noise ratio. Evvers referred to her compositions only by number, but we have prefixed them with the word ‘photism’ – ‘a hallucinatory sensation or vision of light’.

Auditory excavations. Eremitic music. Pareidolia.

Somewhere in Pictland.