Berlin-based Finnish producers Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala first made waves in 2011 as Renaissance Man, an impish electro duo equal parts quirky energy and bleary-eyed techno. The producers have since discarded that shell, reinventing themselves as Amnesia Scanner, a brutalist avant-club project whose music is engineered to alienate and provoke. In loose dialog with dance deconstructionists like Arca, Angel-Ho, and Lotic, Amnesia Scanner’s violently kinetic club visions deal in the dissonant and the absurd, all the while glimpsing hellish dystopian wastelands and the disorientation of future shock.
Since 2014’s AS LIVE [][][][][] and the following year’s AS ANGELS RIG HOOK, Amnesia Scanner have been crumpling grime, trap, rave and various regional dance strains into one convulsive, machine-like knot. Last year’s AS EP, Amnesia Scanner’s first official physical release, dialed back on the aggression ever so slightly, distilling the duo’s inclination for shrapnel textures and keening electronics into comparatively shorter, more accessible bursts. The duo’s latest, the AS TRUTH mixtape, flips the script once again—Amnesia Scanner has never sounded this abstract, this exceptionally unstable.
AS TRUTH’s artwork depicts a lobotomy—what looks like a forced lobotomy, to be specific. The victim appears resigned to his fate, looking confused, dejected, but also angry. In turn, the viewer is forced to share in that terrifying scene, in that discomfort, in that fear. Similarly, AS TRUTH feels like a music that’s flung at you, forced on you—something that not so much asks to be interpreted as reaches out and grabs at your attention, in thrilling, if deeply unnerving, ways. Throughout its 15 unbroken minutes, the mixtape hurls listeners into a bramble of juxtaposing textures and timbres. Hi-tech, high-gloss sounds clash up against coarse, serrated ones; needling dissonance rubs shoulders with creaky silences. Synths screech and squeal, bellow and gurgle. The percussion flits between skittering, frenzied beat-programming and concussive thunder. Shards of disembodied vocals are interspersed throughout the mixtape, reduced at turns to melting, pitch-shifted ooze and flinty cries. Seemingly brittle one moment, colossally impenetrable the next, AS TRUTH’s angular shapes move in fits and starts, like some cybernetic albatross still searching for its sea legs.
AS TRUTH’s tracklist outlines seven individual cuts, but simultaneously released on SoundCloud and Bandcamp as a single unsegmented stream, the mixtape functions as one long-form work without noticeable seams. Apart from the back-to-back midsection deluge of “AS TRUTH” and “AS BRIETH”—released as a two-sided single last December—AS TRUTH consists of all new material. It starts with a wail—part marine air horn, part digital leviathan stirring to life—and closes with a throaty exhale. In between lives some of the most radical and ear-splitting electronic music you’ll likely encounter all year. From opener “AS POWERLESS,” with its helicopter flicker and haunted rave theme, to outro “AS SANE”, which is of a piece with OPN’s Garden of Delete, AS TRUTH never fails to confound. It’s a release of ferocious intensity, constructed from an unwieldy set of moving, interconnected parts. Vestiges of melody and rhythm are teased here and there, but no sooner do they gain footing than they collapse in on themselves, receding back into the maelstrom.
Yet, for all its noise and frenzy, AS TRUTH also contains some of the slowest-paced and quiet music Amnesia Scanner has released so far. Take the funereal ambient of “AS WEEP”, which breeds tension in its gaping negative spaces. Gothic harpsichord, computerized plinks, slurred vocals, and muted drums are all that cut through the silences. However, this proves to be just another of Amnesia Scanner’s clever devices: they lull you into a false sense of serenity, just so they can later spring a noisy trap.
