"We wanted to play a kind of music that I couldn’t even describe,” says guitarist Nigel Barnes when asked about the impetus behind Portland, Oregon, electroacoustic duo Wroom (pronounced "room"). “We wanted to make music for a nature documentary that exists only in your mind.”

Like a plant shown growing in a time-lapse film, the percolating compositions of Wroom unfurl at a measured pace. Songs and seeds both need time to germinate, and Barnes, along with electronics manipulator Rian Callahan, has taken plenty of that. Some of the kernels on the duo’s debut double album, What We Mean By Hot and Cold, date back four years.

“We wanted to create something less descriptive and more evocative,” says Barnes.

“To use our intuition to find something tangible, but not concrete. Going back to the example of the nature film, the sounds aren’t meant to make you think of, say, when a cheetah takes down a wildebeest; but maybe just the yellow grass of the veldt with their smudged shapes moving around in it as they run.”

For their first show, Wroom played at an art gallery showing graffiti collages. The duo played for four hours non-stop, as they were asked to provide ‘atmosphere.’ “And halfway through the set a woman came up to us to ask when we were going to start playing,” laughs Barnes. “I guess it was because we weren’t rocking out, doing Pete Townshend windmills.”

Indeed, the work of Wroom is imbued more with scientific wonder than primal _expression. In Wroom’s explorations, the duo discovers and refines fragmentary melodies, building on accidental interactions between reoccurring patterns. Blending minimalist atmospherics with textural layers, the collections of tonal drifts embody a paradox: the mechanical creation of something organic. They strive for the balance between two effects: physically calming and mentally stimulating; simultaneously intimate and detached.

The seeds of Wroom were planted when Barnes and Callahan met in 1999 while recording sound for an independent film. They were thrown together by chance through mutual friends, including Portland-based Arena Rock Recording Co. artists Swords. Callahan is also a member of the electronic trio ML, and he and Barnes swapped early four-track recordings. They also exchanged diverse influences such as Brian Eno, Don Caballero, To Rococo Rot, Angelo Badalamenti, and Nobukazu Takemura. They discovered a mutual interest in improvisation and the remolding of slightly outdated “technology” -- whether guitar through effects pedals, analog synthesis, or applying the harmonic foundation of Eastern European folk music to the layering of loops. It was immediately clear that there was a strong resonance between them. “The first time we played together, we played nonstop for two or three hours, and we didn’t say anything the entire time. It just clicked,” says Callahan. “I had my synthesizers going through various effects, and Nigel was playing his guitar through some primitive pedals. Over time the gear hasn’t gotten any fancier, the signal chain and the songs have just gotten longer. We improvise the compositions and record everything to ProTools, mixing it later. We just throw out a net and see what we can catch.”

In addition to composing music, Barnes and Callahan are both visual artists, creating paintings and drawings as well as video work. They love Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies (cards which are drawn at decision-making points to prompt abstract creative direction), Jacques Cousteau, and the work of visual information designer Edward Tufte, but also the simple pleasures of kung fu and zombie movies. Looked at closely everything has its role in the latticework of Wroom. Barnes concludes, “it’s important not to demystify things too much.”