There is a small joke hidden inside "I Alone", and it is not really hidden at all. Andrea Taeggi gives all six pieces titles beginning with “I alone”, then proceeds to make an album fundamentally concerned with relationships: between frequencies, harmonics, instruments, consciousness and the listener. Solitude, in other words, turns out to be rather sociable. It is perhaps the oldest contradiction in the book of contemplative music: one retreats from the world in order to hear how thoroughly one remains connected to it.

"I Alone" is Taeggi’s latest exploration of Just Intonation, a tuning system based on simple frequency ratios rather than the compromises of equal temperament. The technical choice is important, but what makes the album more interesting is the way he refuses to leave it in the laboratory. For Taeggi, “just” becomes both an acoustic principle and an ethical metaphor, a way of imagining relationships without the distortions produced by hierarchy and domination. That could easily have resulted in music wearing a very serious philosophical beard. Instead, "I Alone" remains surprisingly light on its feet. Its ideas are present, but they vibrate rather than lecture.

Taeggi has been investigating the relationship between technology, acoustic phenomena and musical convention for years. An Amsterdam Conservatoire graduate in piano and electronic music, he has worked under his own name as well as 5HT2 and Gondwana, moving through electro-acoustic composition, musique concrète, experimental electronics and bass music. His catalogue includes releases on Mille Plateaux, Type, Opal Tapes and Hands in the Dark, while his work has taken him from CTM and MUTEK to Moers and numerous venues across Europe, North America, South America and Asia. Earlier projects have frequently involved obsolete measuring equipment, analogue synthesisers and unconventional approaches to rhythm and timbre. "I Alone" represents a noticeable change of emphasis: less concerned with rhythmic machinery, more interested in harmony, resonance and sustained attention.

The prepared-piano samples are particularly important here. Recorded at EMS in Stockholm and Luxus Platte in Berlin, they do not simply provide an acoustic counterweight to the electronics. They bring physical imperfections into a system that could otherwise become almost mathematically pristine. The piano becomes a collection of resonances, attacks, overtones and little disturbances, while the synthesised material supplies slowly changing harmonic fields around it. The distinction between “instrument” and “electronic sound” consequently starts to lose its usefulness. You hear objects, but you also hear the relationships between them.

"I alone drift about" establishes this peculiar equilibrium immediately. The title suggests someone who has misplaced the map, but the music does not sound lost. Its movement is patient, almost gravitational, with sounds appearing to lean toward one another without quite arriving. The melody is understated, yet there is a strong sense of direction in the harmonic changes. This is not ambient music in the conventional sense of asking you to stop paying attention. It asks for the opposite: notice the tiny alteration, the interval that has shifted, the tone whose colour seems to change because another tone has entered the room.

That sensitivity to interval becomes even more revealing in "I alone possess nothing". The phrase could be interpreted as spiritual humility, existential complaint or merely an unusually elegant way of announcing that the rent is due. Taeggi wisely allows all three possibilities to coexist. The music is sparse enough for individual tones to acquire weight, but never so austere that the piece becomes a demonstration of how little sound a person can tolerate before checking their phone.

The six titles draw on Taoist thought, particularly ideas surrounding emptiness, stillness, darkness and not-knowing. Yet the album does not attempt to illustrate those concepts literally. Instead, the titles function almost like small philosophical traps. "I alone am dull", for example, is anything but dull. Its harmonic language keeps the ear slightly unsettled, because the tuning prevents the familiar equal-tempered grid from functioning as an invisible safety net. "I alone am dark" moves toward greater density and shadow, but darkness here is not simply low frequency or melancholy. It is a condition of perception, a reminder that not everything needs to be immediately clarified.

This is where Taeggi's use of Just Intonation becomes musically convincing. He has previously explored the system in works such as "Tableaux Vivant", where a re-tuned piano and closely related frequencies generated beating, friction and unusually vivid overtones. His own writings on tuning show that he is interested not merely in alternative pitches but in the physical consequences of their relationships. On "I Alone", that research becomes less overtly experimental and more compositional. The ear is invited to inhabit the consequences rather than inspect the machinery.

"I alone don't know" may be the album's most telling title because uncertainty is precisely what Taeggi preserves. Electronic music often gives the impression that everything has been controlled down to the last parameter. Here, control and ambiguity coexist. Arpeggiated figures emerge without becoming conventional sequences; prepared-piano sounds suggest recognisable gestures before dissolving into texture; harmonic changes seem both deliberate and strangely organic. Recent criticism has similarly noted the record's movement away from the rhythmic density of "Nattdett" and "Biomimetics toward a more melodic, minimal and harmonically focused language.

The closing "I alone am aimless" brings the paradox full circle. Aimlessness does not mean inactivity. It means movement without the obligation to justify a destination. The piece stretches toward seven minutes, allowing the album's tuning system to reveal itself gradually rather than announcing its credentials at the door. This is perhaps the most persuasive aspect of "I Alone": the music does not demand that its ethical premise be accepted before the listening can begin. It simply creates conditions in which attentiveness becomes possible.

There is something quietly radical about that approach. Taeggi's starting point is the inadequacy of music to repair war, injustice and systemic violence, and he makes no grand promise that six electronic compositions will somehow reorganise society. Sensibly, he aims at something smaller: presence, connection, a change in the way we listen. Whether such changes can migrate from perception into collective life is another question, and the album wisely leaves it unanswered. Political history has never been particularly good at taking instructions from synthesizers anyway.

What remains is a record about tuning in the fullest sense of the expression. Its frequencies are adjusted, but so is the listener's attention. Its apparent solitude is populated by resonances. Its spiritual references are balanced by a dry sense of humour. And its idea of justice begins not with a manifesto but with the simple observation that sounds behave differently when they are allowed to relate to one another without being forced into an artificial uniformity.

"I Alone" therefore feels less like an escape from a damaged world than a modest experiment in hearing it differently. Taeggi does not offer harmony as an answer to disorder. He offers harmony as a question: what might things sound like if their relationships were allowed to become more exact, more patient, and less coercive? It is a rather ambitious question for a digital album. Fortunately, the music has the good manners not to shout it.