Electronic producer Aleksi Perälä, does his best to explain Colundi—a tuning system that rejects Western musical scales in favor of a series of resonant frequencies known as “the Colundi Sequence.” For the last few years, Perälä has been using the Colundi Sequence to create a startling amount of music—bubbly, beatific post-rave tracks peppered with curious melodies and a general sense of cosmic optimism. But Colundi is more than just a series of tunings. As Perälä puts it, Colundi is something spiritual, magical, unexplainable. “From the very first music-making experience, the very first jam, Colundi takes over,” he explains. “It’s not you having a jam anymore—Colundi is having a jam, and you’re just the vessel.”
Perälä is not the only Colundi convert out there. Over the last few years, Colundi has grown into a bustling community with a busy Facebook group, a catchphrase—“Colundi everyOne”—and a small army of budding young music-makers scattered across the globe, using the Colundi Sequence to make electronic music that’s shot through with cryptic, eerily beautiful melodies. Colundi’s spiritual side has grown too, blossoming into a dense and circuitous philosophy that takes in religion, alternative science, mysticism, numerology, and the basics of sound. If that all sounds a little confusing, it’s worth mentioning that written into Colundi’s very scripture is the fact that the whole thing is a little slippery to pin down. (As a note on the official Colundi website puts it: “We fail to reliably express our precise thoughts and intentions using words. Consequently, you may fail to understand us. We apologise for the effects of such misunderstanding.”)
Colundi came into being around 2014, the brainchild of Perälä’s friend Grant Wilson-Claridge—best known as the co-founder of the influential IDM label Rephlex, alongside Richard D. James. The official line, though, is that Colundi isn’t so much a new invention as a “rediscovery” of ancient knowledge. “Music all started going wrong with Pythagoras, when they started dividing strings into octaves, a very mathematical approach,” explains Perälä. “The actual important thing, I find, is the frequencies themselves; it’s more about what feels good to people on this planet, and what’s effective?”
It’s hard to know quite what to make of Colundi. At times, you wonder if it’s all a wind-up—although its practitioners certainly seem earnest. Others have noted Colundi’s utopian leanings and various crowdfunding drives and compared it to a cult (indeed, there’s the hint that some Colundi producers are happy to entertain such speculation—the recent vinyl compilation Colund1 features a track credited to one Marshall Applewhite, whose name you might recognize from elsewhere).
All the same, it’s hard to deny that Colundi has had a galvanizing effect. Perälä released four excellent album-length projects in December alone. Meanwhile, the Colundi community is a hive of activity, dozens of aspiring and seasoned producers making mysterious electronic music that sparkles with invention.
Want to investigate further? Here is one release to get you started.
