Akiyama's fourth, and most ambitious solo recording to date, is a sprawling work that bristles, burns and slouches with emotion. Small Explosions That Are Yours To Keep came into being at the twilit edges of composition and digital manipulation and sets billowing strings drifting around household gamelans while shimmering guitars drown in saxophone waves.

Montreal-based musician and media artist Mitchell Akiyama is perhaps best known for his electronic deconstructions of traditional instrumental music. Since his debut recording on Alien8 Recordings, Hope That Lines Don't Cross, he has emerged as one of Canada's premier electronic composers and has recorded for internationally renowned labels such as German minimalist label Raster Noton (Temporary Music, 2002) and Belgian sound art innovator Sub Rosa (If Night Is A Weed And Day Grows Less, 2004).

Akiyama's music is a study in fiction and texture. He records compositions and improvisations for piano, strings, and other instruments, and restructures them in his studio in a post-facto montage. Playing on the distortions in causality that recording technology can effect, Akiyama creates music that lays claim to a moment of creation that never happened. Imperfections - fingers scraping strings, breaths and other signs of humanity - are underscored resulting in a digital simulacrum of performance. Located somewhere in the interstices of classical, electronic composition and post-rock, his works vacillate between delicate melodies and confrontational bursts of noise.