Eleh prefers to shield his identity from those who would buy his music. Only in the last year have we had a positive ID on his gender, because before he started performing live – pumping meticulously calculated sine wave drones through space (while keeping his face hidden, of course) – the Eleh who released music on limited edition vinyl, available only online, might have been male, or female, or even a collective identity for electronic music released under the Eleh moniker by persons unknown as, and when, certain predetermined aesthetic criteria were satisfied.

But why should you, gentle Gramophone reader, care about nameless drone-based electronica? Eleh (pronounced ‘Ella’) does touch on music reviewed reasonably often in this magazine; there could have been no Eleh without La Monte Young, Morton Feldman or Terry Riley. But, if I’m honest, there is no specific reason why you should be interested; except I hoped you could be interested in what Eleh’s work says about where we’re at circa 2012. Because if the last century was about a strategic tussle between tonality and atonality, Eleh lines up arguments about a great cultural divide that we all need to face during the 21st century: that between music and sound.

Check out Eleh’s titles. As it is, an album calling itself ‘Floating Frequencies/Intuitive Synthesis’ – one which incorporates pieces with titles like Pulsing Study of 7 Sine Waves – is clearly the product of a mind entranced by the fundamentals of sound. In that way countryside ramblers claim landscape obliges them to commune with deep truths, Eleh forces you to contemplate the cosmos and your place in it.

Bass throb, resonating purely or sick with harmonic interference, generates patterns that dovetail and intersect, that grow from and evaporate back into hovering overtones, this whole narrative stretched over long-form durations. Everything happens, nothing happens. Eleh even threatens his listeners with the prospect of boredom. After opening yourself to wavering fluctuations of sound, grounding your senses in energy fields of fundamental harmonics, Eleh may reward you with a seismic glissando or aftershock flutter. Or he may not bother.

Composers impose their view on the world, on sound, and brand it with their name. Notwithstanding the paradox that, by insisting on anonymity, Eleh has provoked frenzied guesswork about his identity, his sounds move by stealth and are sculpted from the world rather than from ego. Eleh is not a personality; Eleh is an idea about sound.