AMNESIA SCANNER & FREEKA TET - Hoax + STROBE.RIP - 3LP - Vinyl [MAY 16]

3LP - Standard Weight Black Vinyl.

STROBE.RIP

Amnesia Scanner’s third full-length album, STROBE.RIP, is a collaboration with 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 drawn 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 state, “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.

HOAX

Mutating out of the collaborative practice established on STROBE.RIP, Amnesia Scanner and Freeka Tet return with a new dual-record project that explores and explodes norms of music production, songwriting, and sonic aesthetics.

HOAX is not simply an album and its remix released together—it is a singular experience unfolding as two mirroring, mutually reinforcing (or perhaps deconstructing) records. The AS HOAX record by Amnesia Scanner delivers a liquid drip of devastating ballads, wandering mosh-ups, and industrial floodlights. But, as with every Amnesia Scanner release, it is impossible to mistake the grunged-out doom for nihilism: there is too much raw emotion, vulnerable narrative, and playful experimentation. With drums and chaos from Freeka on four ASFT tracks, Amnesia Scanner has perhaps created 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 FT HOAX, the debut full-length record released under the Freeka Tet moniker. This conceptual art piece is unapologetically immediate. Using custom bashed scripts, the AS HOAX 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 to eliminate environmental sounds is turned inward 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 listeners to a serene, contemplative plateau. The dual mirrored records are meant to be unlocked together: listening to the drone-ification reveals hidden patterns and movements, training the ear to perceive deeper layers of subliminal encoding within HOAX.

The lyrics act as a sticker suspended above a reflective abyss—labeled ingredients that anchor meaning amidst the crashing waves of Oracle’s baritone sax crooning and operatic countertenor samples from latent space. The resulting They Live glasses ripped from the listener’s eyes transform this dual-record project into a scathing polemic on the state of music and creativity, ultimately raising the stakes of what it means to be an artist in the post-post-post-digital-crypto-AI-utopia-anthropocene.

Tracklist: 

DISC1:

SIDE A:
01. ASFT Ruff
02. AS Over
03. AS Amygalda
04. AS Neverend
05. AS Mantra
06. ASFT Tazzie

SIDE B:
07. ASFT ISSOK
08. AS Disco
09. AS Back
10.AS U
11. ASFT Icaros

DISC 2:

SIDE A:
01. FT Ruff
02. FT Over
03. FT Amygdala
04. FT Neverend
05. FT Mantra
06. FT Tazzie
SIDE B:
07. FT ISSOK
08. FT Disco
09. FT Back
10. FT U
11. FTAS Icaros

DISC 3:

SIDE A:
01. Tongue Demons
02. Giggle
03. Bounds
04. Ledge
05. Disperse
06. Ride

SIDE B:
07. Damon
08. Clown
09. abandoned.club
10. Scorpions, Bats & Spiders
11. Cat
12. Merge