Amnesia Scanner
Another Life
Release Date: Sep 7, 2018
Genre(s): Electronic, Avant-Garde, Experimental Electronic, IDM, Experimental Club, Grime
Record label: Pan
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Album Review: Another Life by Amnesia Scanner
Excellent, Based on 4 Critics
Based on rating 9/10
Another Life begins with a scream, a distinctly synthetic shriek, calling out. It foreshadows the chaos and sonic artifice to follow on the album's turbulent, blissful journey through its cyber-grunge world. Tension vis a vis our world's technological advancements is present even in the album's calmest, most structured moments, and at its most unhinged sounds like encrypted data come forth to signal the fragile, ignorant symbiosis we have developed with the electronic world. At times human voices return, both to warn of the mayhem ….
Based on rating 4.0/5
Amnesia Scanner, AKA Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala, make what's called deconstructed club music, which leaves behind the idea of dance music as escapism and instead lets society's feelings of unease trickle through. By skewing familiar club structures, grating lustrous sounds against boorish ones and processing vocals beyond recognition, they've always thumbed their noses at contemporary culture. With their first full-length, Another Life, the duo confirm their gift for cultural commentary.
Based on rating 7.5/10
Across the EPs leading up to their debut album, Amnesia Scanner have shown that their shape-shifting, all-encompassing experimental bass music is something to be inhabited. It's best experienced loud, allowing yourself to feel cocooned inside, opening yourself to let it to seep into your bones. This has been effective in short bursts, and on their debut album they take this to further extremes, asking you to completely inhabit their vision of Another Life.
Based on rating 7.5/10
The Berlin experimental duo Amnesia Scanner renders club music as pure chaos, but producers Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala are just as interested in equilibrium. It's a quality best captured in the "AS Crust" video, from their 2016 EP AS, and its looping visual of a robot dog stumbling to regain balance after receiving a swift kick. The robot saves itself with eerily human flails, movements straight from the uncanny valley, just in time to catch another boot once the loop cruelly resets.
'Another Life'
is available now