Music Munchers - Aaltopiiri by Pan Sonic

Product Review
Stark, and stretched out like the frozen tundra of Pan Sonic's native Finland, Aaltopiiri journeys along the strange, twisting paths of a minimalist and intensely ambiguous digital landscape. The band's approach, like on 1999's A, has few connections with traditional concepts of rhythm, instead luxuriating in the ambient netherworlds inhabited by Aphex Twin on sparse records like Selected Ambient Works, Vol. 2, or the music of composer Philip Glass. In seeking out the furthest abyssal reaches of what we call techno, the band sheds all pretense of cohesiveness, reveling in the cold mystery at the heart of ambient music. It is left up to you to fill in the blanks, and that makes this record as good, or as bad, as your own imagination will allow. --Matthew Cooke

This review is from: Aaltopiiri (Audio CD) I would not advise anyone to do what I did, which was to plug this album into my ears and drift away to sleep on an airplane. Not only did I get weird dreams about being stranded on some automated supply base in the polar regions, but I was awakened near the end of the album by tremendous shrieking blasts of unattenuated feedback. Overall, I like the album a lot. It's not something I need to listen to daily, but I can definetely appreciate it as a work of music. I suppose there are people out there whose musical sensibilities are either so assaulted by conventional stuff or so advanced that this is like the soothing voice of the creator; but to me it's just nothing more or less than good. It reminds me of the pinging and thrumming of some as-yet-undeveloped intelligent tracking system, hijacked by missionaries who have just been to their first rave and who are trying to re-create the experience at a more "appropriate" tempo. Comment | Permalink | (Report this)