![]() ![]() Haimala sings with comparatively little vocal manipulation, somberly howling “ You will be fine/ You will be fine/ If we can help you lose your mind.” It feels like an exercise in self-soothing, as midi string plucks wash over you with the compressed dread of a thousand Sunday hangovers. The album’s closer U Will Be Fine is an excellent example of this. But for every dance-until-the-world-ends moment, there’s another where the duo reveal themselves to be less ironic than ever before. I see what he means tracks like Tearless and Labyrinth still maintain that tongue-in-cheek mimicking of today’s trends while poking at the sinister like a petulant child. is a continuum of, more into this sort of weird realisation that things are deeply not good right now,” says Haimala before Kalliala cuts him off insisting, “But in a fun way!” “When we write music we want to capture that real emotion. Haimala adds that, in response to the world’s impending doom, Amnesia Scanner has become more of an emo project. “We want to make art that’s an expression of, or exaggeration of, the contemporary experience we’re living through,” Kalliala says. Where Another Life was a rampageous bomb of anger and panic, expressed through dense maximalist sound collages and processed bionic vocals, their next album TEARLESS captures the more sobering zeitgeist of 2020. In a way, Amnesia Scanner is a time capsule. When stuff like the alt-right and that sort of imagery appeared in those spaces, we wanted to make sure people knew this is not an alt-right troll.” “When the project started, there were a lot of alternative internet spaces which were present in the aesthetic, back when those were much more innocent places. “Because we hadn’t given out any information, people started writing all these ‘facts’ about Amnesia Scanner that weren’t true,” Haimala says. While anonymity comes with its perks if your practice is beloved in deep corners of the internet, it can also lead to some dangerous assumptions. So around the time their 2018 album Another Life came out, they broke the spell with an interview published in The Fader. The two laugh about how they didn’t want to do the “corniest thing ever” and become masked DJs like Claptone or Deadmau5. “ was just to let this world develop on its own rather than us somehow being the voices or the face or imposing some kind of narrative,” explains Kalliala. In those early AS days, they advertised themselves as “xperienz designers,” keeping their identities hidden behind a wall of helter-skelter sounds and foreboding YouTube videos. They turned the formats and culture they’d grown bored of inside out, taking glee in poking holes and amplifying the garish parts. The switch to Amnesia Scanner, an anagram of Renaissance Man, came naturally. ![]() You know with techno-house, blah blah blah, there’s a certain kind of format, there were certain kinds of spaces we had to be in, and had all these functional requirements,” he explains. “With the Renaissance Man stuff, we just got extremely bored. Their bond was solidified when they designed a nightclub together, and soon after, their first project was born: a techno outfit called Renaissance Man. “We were living in Helsinki, Finland, where we’re from, and ended up working in the same architecture office,” Kalliala says of the group’s origin. But with merch samples strewn across surfaces and shelves lined with colourful silicone skins to sheath the animatronic singing mouth they had commissioned back in the autumn, it’s certainly not dull. When I tell you their studio is small, I’m not kidding. The two form experimental electronic duo Amnesia Scanner, which rose from an aesthetically cryptic project that caught the eyes of blogs and internet trawlers in 2014 to one of the most hyped electronic acts in recent years. He’s arranging the room for their Crack Magazine photoshoot, the little metal tag on the back pocket of his Prada jeans flapping with every stride. “I’m such a stylist!” Ville Haimala laughs as he carts a bright orange office chair into the small corner studio he and his musical partner Martti Kalliala share with their label PAN.
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