'Journey Test' is composer and pianist Tristan Eckerson's first album under the moniker of Purple Decades, his new ambient project. While his past work has focused largely on solo piano, Purple Decades is an exploration into soundscapes, electronic textures, and hypnotic musical environments. While many tracks on the album still feature piano or keyboards in some form, the compositional approach is accompanied by extensive work with reverb, foley, and orchestral electronic arrangements, and some tracks have eschewed the piano completely, opting instead for immersive and texturally rich auditory journeys.

Each of the 8 songs on 'Journey Test' convey a sense of serene movement and cinematic scale, conjuring the horizon line of landscapes both distant and internal, a wordless dialectic between contentment and nostalgia. Tracks like the piano-driven 'Kagami' and the slow-building title track (whose crescendo brings to mind Sigur Ros) emphasize beguiling and cyclical melodies while 'Pathway' leavens the mood with a glacial sweep, all the while drinking from the same sense of wonder and openness that pervades the whole album.

In the artist's own words: "After many years of writing nothing but music for solo piano, I was ready for something new when I began the process of creating Journey Test. I wanted to take the same vibe and overall aesthetic that I had created with my solo piano work, but really strip down the compositional approach into something that focused on the sound itself. Basically bringing the background to the forefront. And instead of traditional instruments, I wanted to use electronic sounds, but still in a way that it sounded very organic, almost to the point where you didn't know if you were listening to an orchestra or a bunch of synthesizers. I didn't use a lot of different electronic instruments for the album, but rather I focused on what each instrument could bring to the table in terms of texture, noise, organic sounds, and subtle details that could all be combined into something that was an experience. Something that took the listener on an auditory journey without them having to make an effort to get there."