A compact disc has lately acquired the uncanny quality of an object returned from the future.

It is circular, mirrored, encoded with invisible information and capable of producing absent voices. It can be carried in a pocket. Light plays across its surface in impossible little rainbows. Put it into the correct machine and an absent room reconstitutes itself around you.

“You could make an argument that a compact disc is a form of UFO,” says James Quentin Devine of Scaled Alps.

The group's Let the Alpine Play has been issued physically as a hand-numbered CD accompanied by an Owner's Manual, an arrangement that sounds faintly comic until one sees the logic. The record's visual language borrows from old computer displays, technical documents and the sort of utilitarian graphic systems normally intended to make machinery comprehensible. Instead of treating the physical edition as deluxe merchandise, the thing behaves as equipment.

Digital music solved the problem of access so comprehensively that access itself became aesthetically meaningless. Almost everything is almost everywhere. The resulting interface presents canonical recordings, somebody's demo and twelve hours of rain sounds as equivalently sized rectangles.

The physical object restores distinctions the screen has difficulty maintaining: this thing has edges; it occupies a place; somebody printed it; somebody can lose it; somebody else can find it.

Scaled Alps' interest in allegedly obsolete media does not read as simple nostalgia. Devine's language is more functional than sentimental: “Operate in the physical. The unfakeable.”

The internet is filling rapidly with things possessing uncertain origins, uncertain authors and uncertain relationships to the world outside the screen. A badly folded flyer, a scratched CD or a handwritten number on a package possesses one increasingly valuable property: it plainly happened somewhere.

Let the Alpine Play still streams everywhere, of course. The UFO has Wi-Fi. But a compact disc does something a stream does not. It arrives.