Amnesia Scanner and Freeka Tet- HOAX & STROBE RIP

Amnesia Scanner’s third full-length album titled STROBE.RIP is a collaboration with the artist and musician Freeka Tet, who joins the album and associated live performances as a vocalist and creative collaborator. Released by Pan records, STROBE.RIP is part of a broader series of live performances, installations, videos, and physical products created by the group.

Since its inception in 2014, Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala have continued to evolve and redefine Amnesia Scanner through experimentation across online and IRL realms. This album brings them a step closer to the latter. With French-born, New York City-based Freeka Tet on board, STROBE.RIP acquires a new array of influences that draw from the multidisciplinary artist’s hacker mindset, shaping the sound into new forms.

As a programmer and technologist, Freeka Tet’s work straddles commerce and art, combining intuitive and performative modes of expression with emergent technology and creative coding. Much like Amnesia Scanner, Tet draws from online vernacular and techno-magic to create satirical, uncanny work – artificially augmented, and highly engineered sounds, textures, images, and ideas that translate memes and code into a more human and affective language.

Haimala and Kalliala say, “Amnesia Scanner is now living in the world it has built,” signaling a sincere commitment to the act. The human dimension in STROBE.RIP is chaotic: a reverse hero’s journey that merges deep-fried baroque with the quasi-angelic into a psychotic megamix of tropes, lyrics, genres, and sonic palettes that are both disorienting and deeply resonant.

Mutating out of the collaborative practice established on STROBE.RIP, Amnesia Scanner and Freeka Tet are back with a new dual record project that explores and explodes norms of music production, songwriting, and sonic aesthetics. HOAX is not an album and remix released together, but rather, a singular experience unfolding as two mirroring, mutually-reinforcing records.

The Amnesia Scanner “AS HOAX” record administers the liquid drip of devastating ballads, wandering mosh-ups, and industrial floodlights that we fiend for. But, as with every AS record, it is impossible to mistake the grunged-out doom for nihilism: there is simply too much raw emotion, vulnerable narrative, and playful experimentation.

With drums and chaos from Freeka on four “ASFT” tracks, AS has delivered perhaps their most prescient, hopeful, and soon-to-be-seminal record of their genre-defining career. Against this belligerent crispness emerges the sublime obelisk of noise in Freeka Tet’s “FT HOAX”. This is the debut full-length record released under the Freeka Tet moniker.

It is a conceptual art piece that is unapologetically immediate. Using custom bashed scripts, the AS record is negated, inverted, and buffed down to reveal underlying rhythms and textures. Freeka has taken the ubiquitous technology of noise-canceling headphones as a point of departure for this experiment in music denial.

The desire for eliminating environmental sounds is turned inwards to undermine the music itself. A variety of original techniques are used for ambient AS cancellation, including creating a virtual space simulation and adding noise to spectrogram images. While Freeka’s gesture is extreme, the result brings you to a serene contemplative plateau.

The dual mirrored records are meant to be unlocked together: listening to the drone-ification opens up patterns and movements previously hidden, your newly trained ear will go deeper into the layers of subliminal encoding on HOAX, leaving you reprogrammed.

The lyrics are a sticker suspended above reflective abyss: labeled ingredients are anchors that pull a connection out of the crashing shores of Oracle’s baritone sax croning and operatic countertenor samples from latent space. The resulting They Live glasses that are ripped from your eyes make this dual record project a scathing polemic on the state of music and creativity, thus raising the stakes of what it means to be an artist in the post-post-post-digital-crypto-AI-utopia-anthropocene.