For Finnish electronic duo Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala, AKA Amnesia Scanner, music proposes an opportunity to disrupt. Since 2016, they’ve acted on instinct, producing a small yet potent body of work that tears apart the codes of genre and convention. They exist as a constructed glitch in the matrix, a reminder of just how abstract concrete reality can actually be. Like Amnesia Scanner, New York’s Freeka Tet considers himself a “creative mercenary,” trading in experimental, boundary pushing gesamtkunstwerk that combines his interests in biomechanics, coding, and hacking with traditional forms of sound, performance, and visual art. Both he and Amnesia Scanner find themselves invested in our post-human present and future, observing the internet, technology, and online spaces as a portal into an augmented parallel reality. On STROBE.RIP, Amnesia Scanner’s latest LP for current label PAN, these two creative forces fuse together as one on a collaborative body of work that continues their translation of the digital into “a more human and affective language.”
As its beat poetry cover art might suggest, this is an album rooted in free form chaos. Ideas and sounds come hard and fast, a fragmented melange of textures, samples, and familiar tropes car crashed together to form new, uncanny shapes. But from this chaos, Amnesia Scanner and Freeka Tet attempt to pull emotional responses that speak directly toward the human experience ‘IRL.’ Tellingly, the sonic influences they pull from to collide with each other are alarmingly diverse and at times, disparate. Damon mutates grunge and death metal with acerbic glitch, like an Anthrax song tossed into a particle accelerator with Burial. Ride owes much to The Neptunes with its guitar driven R&B-pop melodies, there’s simmering reggaeton and wonky downtempo garage on Giggle and Bounds respectively, while Ledge merges dub and grime with SOPHIE style synths and breakneck 160bpm trance.
Download and stream STROBE.RIP here
These boisterous experiments and stylistic clusterfucks highlight how the alternate realities of Amnesia Scanner and Freeka Tet exist to challenge and defy classification. This is most apparent on the album’s loudest statement of defiance. Scorpions, Bats, & Spiders declares death to Deconstructed Club, that neologism cooked up and relished by music critics, but often rejected by the artists most associated with it. Chopping, screwing, and spelling out the phrases ‘deconstructed club’ and ‘panel discussion’ in a swirling vortex of engineered noise, the track’s suggestion is clear: we create the reality we perceive. Like AI or simulation technology, we often generate truths to secure from what we perceive to be chaos. While the work of Amnesia Scanner and Freeka Tet may feel far removed from human comprehension, it’s actually a commentary on human instinct itself. As Haimala and Kalliala say, “Amnesia Scanner is now living in the world it has built,” and STROBE.RIP makes the argument that so are we.
