ONE of the Scottish music scene's best kept secrets has emerged yet again from its Galashiels laboratory.

Electron Mass has just released its fourth quartet of atmospheric mini-masterpieces.

And while they won't be troubling the commercial airwaves or the even more commercial charts, yet again this duo and their friends have made their mark.

Songwriters Sorensen Small and Brendan McAndrew use Electron Mass as an outlet for their unusual collaborations about science, nature and the cosmos.

In their previous carnation, Small and McAndrew produced a stunning album as the Stone Ghost Collective.

While they have moved the focus of their microscope away from unrequited love, they have managed to maintain something beautiful with compositions about space, the Earth, the human mind and death.

As Electron Mass, they released three wonderful EPs - Earthlight, Luminous and Selene - during 2018.

Last week they added to their canon for the curious with four more instantly appealing, yet diverse, songs, neatly packed together as The Dopamine Girl EP.

Each compelling composition while different from the next, encompasses beautiful orchestration and haunting harmonies.

And while it may take a degree or two to decipher the cryptic cantations, as with the previous EPs, The Dopamine Girl is a 'press repeat' type of listen.

Title track Dopamine Girl is, in their words, a short and sweet alternative-pop song... 'We knew it would last forever, but forever had its day'.

The Twin Peaks-inspired Love Dilation is as dark as it is atmospheric.

But it is perhaps the utterly engrossing simplicity of Imprints that makes it so special. While McAndrew has the harmonic range, Small's almost monotoned meanderings, accompanied by the backing vocals of Grant Pringle and Cameron Jack, creates the rawest of emotions.

Concluding the new EP is the orchestral art-song, A Theory of Everything. Built around a single, beautifully menacing chord, which apparently symbolises the background radiation in our universe, the finale discusses the search for discovering a unifying theory of everything.

To quote Small from Imprints, 'As you travel through space, you are displaced, imagining time. You exist like a plant, you bloom and you grow, then wither and die. But the one card you play, genetically, is always an ace. For the imprints you leave, have changed the fabric of time and space'.

If there is any justice in the supersonic space-age future, Electron Mass's four EPs will hopefully have changed the fabric of music down here on Earth.