Amazon.co.uk 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, as with 1999's
A, has few connections with traditional concepts of rhythm, instead luxuriating in the ambient netherworlds inhabited by
Aphex Twin on sparse records such as
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 pretence of cohesiveness, revelling 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 allows. --
Matthew Cooke
Description
Aggressively experimental and sometimes unapologetically abrasive, the Finnish electronica duo Pan Sonic (originally known as Panasonic) are as much in debt to industrial pioneerslike Suicide, Throbbing Gristle, and Nurse With Wound as they are to like-minded techno artists like Pole and Autechre.Though the chill inducing sonic vistas of 2001's AALTOPIIRIrarely approach the unrestrained ferocity of the group's early work, numbers like the near ambient "Vaihtovirta" and the truly alien sounding percussion of "Aanipaa" make AALTOPIIRI one of the group's most inventive and consistently engaging works.