The history of aviation might seem more the stuff of dusty museum displays than cutting edge electronic music. But listening to Turkish-Austrian composer Murat Ses's album "Binfen," you soon get the feeling that it's not so much the mechanical feats of the early flying machines about which Ses is rhapsodizing: it's the romance, the dream of men flying like birds and angels that so intoxicated Binfen, Lagari, and other pioneers during the so-called "fantastic period" of aviation history, when even the Wright brothers were still hundreds of years to come.

Using solely electronic timbres (many of his own creation, especially the Eastern instrument emulations), Ses has created what amounts to 16 "cues" for an imaginary movie on Binfen, Lagari, Gevheri, et al. (though you wouldn't know it without the detailed press kit). But a soaring John Williams score this is not. The album is more like a procession of mini musical collages in which inventive collections of timbres, polyrhythms, sampled sound bites, and patterned musical threads evoke moods and images mostly out of small, "lighter-than-air" instrumental gestures. "Lagari," for example, salutes a madcap who skyrocketted over the Bosphorous! But while there occasionally are rocket sounds to be heard, the song is dominated by a crisp clockwork Levantine groove that seems like a musical equivalent not of pyrotechnics in the sky, but of the "what me worry?" optimism that must have propelled Lagari as much as any gunpowder or rocket fuel.

For some reason, Ses has chosen to program or record most of his sounds very dry. With many of these timbres being very thin, harsh, choppy, or otherwise synth-quirky to begin with, the effect (to my ears, at least) is to deny the songs much of the romantic warmth and spaciousness they thematically would seem to require.

Still, "Binfen" is a fine collection of miniatures that aims to please -- and often delights.