On Buenos Aires-born musician and composer Ulises Conti's new album, he's fashioned 27 brief sketches, titled from A to Z (don’t forget the Ñ), into billowing lines of musical verse that equally reward individual contemplation and cumulative immersion. Conti gives diverse musical forms to phonemes and diphthongs by drawing on a sound vocabulary that is limited, but with nuanced differences of resonance and inflection. The music is somewhere between electronic ambient and post-classical sound art. Enigmatic themes for processed piano and guitar are humanized by manipulated field recordings of everyday things from amusement parks to insects. These compositions blend passages of airy light with dark, cloistered ones, as if traveling through patches of clearing and shade or through days and nights. When your landscape is an alphabet, scale is elusive.

Overall, the music is austerely sacred, melodically lush, and elegiac, highlighting the orphaned quality of isolated letters, which communicate clearly only in their connections to each other. There are dreamy duets and trios for high-contrast timbres, brooding piano ruminations, and acoustic sounds processed into grainy drones and clipped pulses. The spirit of the album is soft and pensive, but tightly coiled; it periodically gathers to peaks of compressed fury ("H"). Conti has a graceful way with flickers of mottled counterpoint ("I" and "J"), differentiating his simple, revolving motifs. He packs satisfying amounts of development into short pieces while preserving their discrete musical perimeters.

Occasionally, the relationship between letter and sound is obvious—satisfyingly so in the cases of vowels, such as the choral aspiration of "A" and the shivery shriek of "E". Elsewhere, linking letters such as "C" and "G" to their corresponding notes feels like a slight failure of imagination. But mostly, the interpretations are infinitely subjective, engaging the listener's imagination. At times, Conti captures the audible contours of a letter's sound, at others, its visual shape. "K" makes you suddenly hear that consonant's curt bite in the piano's upper octaves, while the tightly swiveling sequence of "L" evokes turning back and forth through the letterform's right angle.

The brilliant "B" combines both approaches: there are voluptuous curves in the piano and a "buh"-like sound in the root note of the guitar figure. "N" and its tilde-bearing cousin are woven together in a lattice of bird song and tolling church bells that feels so notably sacrosanct you wonder if they have personal significance for Conti. The exhaling drones of "H" seem on the verge of asking "Who?" and then, as the intensity increases, "Help!" "S" has a sibilant thrum, slithering on a cushion of air. "V" almost vanishes, repeatedly tapering down into a silent vacuum. "X" is a burst of busy, crisscrossing speed before the closing lullaby of "Z".

Conti reveals letters to be so swollen with associations that his slender tracks feel like larger metaphorical conduits than they should rightfully be. The composer renews our sense of connection to these strange, almost invisibly familiar little squiggles of code, turning us into sonic cryptographers. Like the alphabet, the small pieces, in sum, seem to contain everything in the world—a luxuriously full compendium of meaning, if only we could put it in the right order to reveal it.