Anna Atkins, the 19th century botanist and photographer whose Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions is widely regarded as the first photographic book, made her images by placing algae directly onto paper coated with a light-sensitive solution. Where the plant blocked the ultraviolet light, the paper remained white. Everywhere else, it turned the deep Prussian blue that gives the process its name. At the center of each image, the algae’s fronds produced their own negative.

Emily A. Sprague first encountered cyanotypes while shooting film photography in her bathtub around 2018, when she was experimenting with leaking light into film and altering development times and temperatures. As opposed to her role as a singer-songwriter in the band Florist, Sprague has always approached her ambient solo recordings “more like photography,” a way of capturing a place and a specific moment in Sprague’s life. She has never recorded in the same location twice.

On Cyano, her latest modular synth-driven ambient album, Sprague is trying to document something that cannot really be captured, like a smell or a dream. Rather than preserving a particular moment or telling a linear story, she uses fragments of lyrics, field-like electronic textures, and recurring images to give form to sensations that are difficult to describe. The lyrics often take the perspective of an observer moving through the natural world and trying to understand how she interrelates with it—a figure partly inspired by Atkins.

There is also something newly scientific about Sprague’s own process. She brings the intuitive, associative way she has traditionally written that has animated both her solo music and Florist into a more deliberate, rigorous practice. Her music tends toward slow pacing and stasis: a kind of minimalism that foregrounds the frenzied activity concealed inside something that appears still. That might mean holding a note or asynchronous loop for an unusually long time, while she plugs in some barely perceptible harmonies and whizzing overtones. It is like watching bacteria swim beneath a microscope.

Cyano extends this fascination with the interplay between flow and stasis. The album is filled with deep, chordal synth textures, long reverberations, and sequenced figures and delays, including a particularly important 22-second delay that creates loops in which sound returns after enough time has passed for the original to begin decaying. “Double Moon” sounds both molten and frozen, its little plinking beat and luminous drones drifting in opposite directions. Listening feels like a sensorium of light and sound, an attempt to imagine how the world might have sounded in utero.

On “Garden of Charms,” Sprague applies her songwriterly instinct to ambient music, even though the piece contains no words. Around simple open fourths and fifths, she places benthic synthesizer tones and lets the melody gradually come into focus. Like much of the record, it resembles a vaguely hallucinogenic journey guided by the reassuring voice of a shaman. On “Sing To,” Sprague’s songwriter voice and her more abstract electronic language meet most acutely: a less somber, more synthetic version of Grouper’s Ruins. The track begins like a cool wind rushing past, then settles into the reassuring, delirious slow crawl of sleep. Around Sprague’s voice, the electronics thin out then fan out around her, as though she’s finally taking the lead. Like a cyanotype, Cyano offers something between the maintenance of order and a surrender to nature: You can control the plant, the paper, and the strength of exposure, but you cannot control the sun.