PAN SONIC AALTOPIIRI ALBUM BLAST FIRST!, PLAYGROUND RELEASE: JANUARY 16, 2001(NORTH AMERICA), FEBRUARY 19, 2001 (EUROPE) REVIEW: MARCH 1, 2001

For a long time, I thought I would find it impossible to fully appreciate Pan Sonic on their own. I loved "Endless", the album they recorded with howling Suicide singer Alan Vega, but found their own music hard to take in anything but small doses.
Their last album, "A" from 1999, was almost painfully static. It's reverb-laden clicks and hums felt like watching still-lifes of frozen electrodes, and that is only inspiring for so many minutes. But with new album "Aaltopiiri" something has happened. The changes are subtle, but in Pan Sonic's hermetic world, they're a revolution.
Unlike the glitch-obsessed laptop armada that is the duo's contemporary peers, Pan Sonic seem to stick stubbornly to their primitive machinery. But their new material is more expansive, and evolves in a much more rapid pace. The music is still built up of clicking rhythm tracks and the sounds of their machines are breathing and squirming. Now it also echoes of dub reggae's vast inner space, and the mechanical rhythms are funkier than ever. Especially "Kone", that sounds like 80's electrofunk being abused by a bunch of smoke spewing truck engines.
Elsewhere, they move even further into the engine room. "Kierto" ends the album with hammering beats and misters Vainio and Väisänen firing off blasts of noise. But it's when they let the monotony become relieved by a sudden turn that they are at their most impressive. When some slowly modulating feedback suddenly enters in "Vaihtovvirta", it's like seeing the sun for the first time in weeks. And that's impressive for such presumably inhuman music.
Call their music old school industrial, Detroit techno stripped to the metallic bone, horsemeat rockabilly or arctic dub. Pan Sonic are still one of the most oddly fascinating bands of our time.

KRISTOFFER NOHEDEN