Fredrik Rasten’s Strands of Lunar Light is a luminous exploration of spectral microtonality for multiple guitars, all played by Ruben Machtelinckx and himself. In the liner notes Rasten describes the music as elements of an imagined moon: I envision this music as emanating from a moon inhabited by otherworldly life forms and ecosystems; these sounds as evoking the moon’s topographies, beings, lunar rivers, and strands of light — as if this moon’s essence were itself sonic, vibrational matter. Rasten’s compositional and instrumental practice is driven by a deep interest in the sonic details of harmony and microtonality, with just intonation as a main resource and entry point. In the context of his other compositions, Strands of lunar light explores a new territory comprising a dense, spectral harmony derived from a complete segment of an harmonic series. The work is part of Rasten’s continuing exploration of just intonation realized on guitars, building on his earlier released works Six Moving Guitars, Svevning and Lineaments.

"I envision this music as emanating from a moon inhabited by otherworldly life forms and ecosystems; these sounds as evoking the moon’s topographies, beings, lunar rivers, and strands of light — as if this moon’s essence were itself sonic, vibrational matter. Musically and acoustically, Strands of lunar light departs from a set of tones corresponding to a confined harmonic series segment of a very low fundamental frequency: 5.15 hertz. Through twelve continuous sections, each employing various methods of activating openly tuned guitar strings, the music is sculpted from the twenty-four pitches corresponding to harmonics 24 through 47 of this fundamental frequency. At times, the natural second (octave) harmonics of the open strings are activated and introduce a secondary, octave transposed version of the original harmonic series segment, doubling the fundamental frequency to 10.30 hertz, and thereby revealing a brighter vibrational realm. As a consequence of the rational pitch relationships integral to harmonic series of tones, these two sub-audio fundamental frequencies (pitch wise existing two and three octaves below the E-string of a double bass, respectively) can be heard in the music as the frequencies of the interference patterns produced by the simultaneous sounding of any pair of adjacent tones in the respective sets of tones. These interference patterns, of 5.15 or 10.30 hertz (depending on the octave of the tones produced), are perceived as even pulsations occurring with varying degrees of clarity over the course of the piece. I imagine these fundamental frequencies and their related harmonic tones as the element" - Fredrik Rasten, August 2024