- With Amnesia Scanner, Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala of Renaissance Man—yes, it's an anagram—have pulled off a great reinvention. Their new project is so far from what they've done before (i.e. playful techno for labels like Turbo) that most people won't realize it's them. Championed early by Janus, a Berlin crew and party that dismantles dance music, Amnesia Scanner take modern club music's obsession with chrome textures, hi-def samples and found sound to absurd levels.
Smashing glass, searing synths, pounding kicks, pockets of silence interrupted by meteor strikes—Amnesia Scanner weave fragments of club bangers into obtuse short films. (Their music videos are just as mystifying.) Notable works include lengthy, multi-part compositions, like the poetic "radio play" AS Angels Rig Hook and their A/V collaboration with Bill Kouligas, LEXACHAST. Now, Haimala and Kalliala's first traditional release is an EP for Young Turks.
The duo fit their sprawling universe into three-minute chunks pretty damn well; AS feels like a distilled and sharpened version of what they do best. The EP is full of disembodied sounds and voices mangled beyond recognition. Words are fragmented and julienned, like on the trippy "AS Chingy" or the apocalyptic, Deadboy-style jam "AS Want It," which offers a bright streak of melody. Traditional percussion is nowhere to be found, as the duo solder chords and drums out of soundbites.
AS also demonstrates Amnesia Scanner's dance floor potential. Genre foundations are used as chassis for their odd experiments: "AS Wood Gas" is a trance workout where the euphoria turns sour, while "AS Crust" is essentially a swaggering trap anthem with kicks hitting like a thwack to the face. Haimala and Kalliala seem to build tracks out of the information overload and digital interference around them. If peers like Lotic and Arca use club music to express political or sexual agendas, Amnesia Scanner is willfully opaque. It's impossible to tell what they're sampling most of the time, but it doesn't matter—the results are confusing but compelling.
TracklistA1 AS Gardens Need Walls
A2 AS Chingy
A3 AS Crust
B1 AS Wood Gas
B2 AS Want It
B3 AS Atlas