Amnesia Scanner
Amnesia Scanner is the experimental electronic duo of Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala. Created in late 2013, the group is not exactly new, but they have remained somewhat unrecognizable and wholly inaccessible until this year. As they used to refuse interviews and released several unannounced, unexplained EP’s and mixtapes, Amnesia Scanner floated around as illegible codes for devoted listeners to decipher. Every track title was prefaced by “AS”, and each music video regurgitated images from internet’s forgotten corners, but for what reason?
Now, their 2018 debut album Another Life makes sense and builds upon their initially cryptic thesis: simultaneously emulating and questioning how we satiate IRL anxieties with URL opiates, or what they call “narratives of… salvation via technology”. Treating pop structures as memes, musical and lyrical anaphoras mechanically compute until their deceptive screens are cracked. Pop tropes are shrieked by their frequent collaborator Pan Daijing, or ciphered by the Oracle—a computerized voice that croons like a disillusioned Crazy Frog. Amnesia Scanner toys with learned memetic, consumer behaviors, implanting hedonistic music with thoughtful criticisms. What initially began as an anonymous side project, an outlet for material that was to obscure for Renaissance Man, has developed into a distinct conceptual identity, simulating a bleak but necessary reflection of our digital opiate culture. – Hans Kim