Joy Paradox is the debut long-player from Indian-born British composer Cephas Azariah. The album’s title refers to how in life we often exist at the intersection of conflicting emotions. Reflecting on his own upbringing, divided between cultures, Azariah talks about having to put down something in order to pick up something new. How a beginning is also often an end.

The music mixes electronic and orchestral elements, but the processing is never overt, and the set leans heavily toward modern classical. In places there are playful programmed patterns, that ripple rhythmically. These are busy but always provide a layer of peaceful, calming counterpoint. On Kintsugi, soft bleeps, like signals from distant satellites, surround Azariah’s piano. The contrast conveying a sense of being earthbound while searching the stars. Clusters of cascading notes make like rain on Mellowness Of The Heart. Painting pictures of a storm watched from somewhere safe and warm. Fading Anxieties is super sparse. Azariah’s fingers at an acoustic keyboard cautiously, falteringly feeling out a heartbroken melody. Unhurried is shimmering drone.

Colliding keys reference Steve Reich’s minimalism. Pretty chimes synergise with pools of soothing spirals. Faber and Faber Sanctum riff and reprise the same theme, in a manner similar to Eno’s Sparrowfall. A Prologue For Winter enfolds around a slowly building low-end hum. The resonance’s intensity rising like some overpowering force of nature, maybe the severity of the titular season, before its threat subsides in a final fade.

Contours, perhaps, perfectly captures the album’s central conceit. Recalling the cinematic scores of the sorely missed maestro Johann Johannsson. Simultaneously summoning sensations of both melancholy and hope. Soundtracking the pain of what has passed and the optimism for what is to come.

*Another point of musical reference is Nils Frahm’s Over There, It’s Raining.

Cephas Azariah’s Joy Paradox is out now on Reflections.