Amnesia Scanner are often labelled deconstructed club music, which feels slightly misleading. There’s a loaded-ness to that term: it connotes being cold, detached, calculated. On Amnesia Scanner’s Another Life, there’s an emotional depth: the duo reveal the delicate insides of our cybernetic landscape.
Producers Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala have been releasing music under the Amnesia Scanner guise since 2015. Another Life is their full-length debut, and their most accessible work. Even the occult imagery found on the cover art of their early releases is gone, replaced on Another Life with something more modern, but just as arresting. This isn’t a surrender: it’s an aesthetic response to our apocalyptic present, brought to you very much by Amnesia Scanner.
Another Life is chaotic and cluttered, yet vulnerable: it is perpetually shifting between mania and tranquillity. The listener is wrongfooted then rewarded, often on the same track: the record’s standout is ‘AS A.W.O.L’, which oscillates between gloomy lo-fi ambient and uber-pop choruses. It’s compelling, neo-futurist music that places Amnesia Scanner directly in the lineage of artists like Chino Amobi, Holly Herndon and Oneohtrix Point Never. The album is ghastly, and charming: sometimes simultaneously, but never anything in between.
