Emily A. Sprague - Cyano Emily A. Sprague

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. Cyano was conjured through ideas of an imagined planet whose inhabitants are rebuilding forbidden capacities for expressivity and emotional connection. 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 pseudo-mutuality that eschewed individuality for assimilated symbiosis. Through sensitive attempts, the Cyanic character reintroduces autonomous desire, empathic drive, and authentic expression to their world —part memory, grain, and symbol. 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. Cyano yields an egress for conjuring expressivity, a tool to bridge understanding amidst spectacular and abrading textures of an evolving world.

Sprague’s musical approach is marked by a deeply personal atmosphere, rooted in unearthing histories of self and other—modes of intrapersonal and interpersonal connection—and the mercuriality of these attempts. Through intimate phenomenological exploration, Cyano offers subtle and striking textures that embrace vulnerability. Studio recordings and performances alike serve as a vehicle for Sprague to connect meaningfully with listeners across time, tethered in emotional coherence despite disparate geographies. On Cyano, all sounds are synthesized, with no samples or acoustic instruments, and the record introduces singing into Sprague’s previously-instrumental personal, a bridging of wordless and lyrical music.

With more Cyano composition in ideation, this album marks a first offering, intentionally primitive and minimal, a static-y transmission from the place very far away where it all resides. Sprague’s search for feeling, language, and sound brings new arrangement to psychic matter, life force running through a riparian garden into the sea. These tracks map feeling and place across the magnetic terrains of interior and conjured world, where knowing is mystery that breaks through to reality