Elaine Walker – ‘MACROCHIP (A Bohlen-Pierce Scale Mini-Movie Album)’ [Album Review]

MACROCHIP (A Bohlen-Pierce Scale Mini-Movie Album) arrives like a transmission from a parallel version of electronic pop, one where hooks refract through alien geometry.

Elaine Walker has spent years championing microtonality, and here she turns her fascination into something that plays like a suite of sleek, pulp-sci-fi vignettes. The result is immersive and occasionally disorienting.

What gives the project its real allure is Walker’s refusal to separate the soundtrack from the screen. The eight music videos unfold as speculative dramas, with music and moving image conceived simultaneously rather than stitched together after the fact. Walker’s creative choice gives MACROCHIP a curious momentum: each track feels storyboarded, each visual beat seems to push the arrangement somewhere stranger, and the whole thing seems like a dream rendered in neon chrome.

“The videos are as important as the music,” says Walker. “They’re not music videos, and they’re not movies that I scored. The songs, characters, and plots emerged together, organically, as a single creative process.”

The album’s tonal signature comes from somewhere even more unusual. Every composition is built on the Bohlen-Pierce Scale, the xenharmonic system Walker has made central to her work. Rather than dividing the octave in the usual way, it slices up a tritave into thirteen equal intervals, producing melodies that feel tilted off the axis of Western expectation.

On MACROCHIP, that tuning behaves like a soft but persistent wrongness that gives the album an extraterrestrial glow.

“The entire album was written in the Bohlen-Pierce Scale,” Walker explains. “It’s basically notes from outer space. I hope actual aliens can listen to my music someday.”

There’s a surreality to the videos. At a moment when shortcuts flatten so much digital art into the same glossy mush, Walker assembled MACROCHIP from licensed, human-made stock footage, embracing the limits of found material instead of outsourcing invention.

Elaine Walker, photo courtesy of Elaine Walker

The method is painstaking and results in a composed feeling that’s at once meticulous, synthetic, and handmade in the best sense of the words.

“Roboty” comes in like neo-spacey new wave tinted with jazz flavors as well as exotic surfaces. Whereas “We Come In Peace” rolls out on dark, operatic tones. There’s a stiffness to the melody that increases the sinister mood of the tune.

“Ship Shop” blends retro ‘60s dynamics with industrial, futuristic warbling timbres, riding a syncopated rhythm. This is probably the most ultramodern song on the album. “Delphinity,” the closing track and a personal favorite, delivers swirling, chiming, oscillating colors atop an almost funky beat. For some reason, this track summons suggestions of Rush in their synthesizer phase.

Innovative and totally avant-garde, MACROCHIP (A Bohlen-Pierce Scale Mini-Movie Album) is surprisingly accessible and atmospheric.

MACROCHIP (A Bohlen-Pierce Scale Mini-Movie Album) Track Listing:

1. Roboty
2. We Come In Peace
3. Synchrotronic
4. Subzero
5. Robot Psyop
6. Red Moon Rescue
7. Ship Shop
8. Delphinity

Run Time: 39:51
Release Date: June 10, 2026
Record Label: Independent