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Translated from Finnish, Jan Anderzen’s recording name means “Chemical Friends,” and those kinds of friends might be just the ticket to getting inside of Anderzen’s warped, squiggly psychedelic bedroom pop. His latest Kemialliset Ystävät single was mostly culled from garbled samples and what sounds like half a dozen detuned or destroyed toy instruments.
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A new album from Sami Sänpäkkilät finds the Fonal label head releasing his most (dare we say) accessible Es record to date. Of course that's all relative as the Fonal world is always as mystical as a late night walk through the Finnish forest, and here we find cosmic synthscapes crossing paths with Terry Riley-esque minimalism as well as some droning pop that could have been lifted off a Sublime Frequencies comp featuring radio broadcasts from a distant galaxy.
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If you happen to speak the Finnish language, you'll find Kiila's third full-length rich with native folklore imagery running throughout the record. But for the rest of us, the mysteriously sung melodies only add to the collective's enigmatic blend of various traditional folk music strains, psych-pop, electronic and improv. For the uninitiated, this is a rewarding journey that fans of free-form psychedelia, from Harvester to MV & EE, will come back to again and again.
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Shogun Kunitoki are a long way from the pastoral, atonal post-folk of Fonal labelmates like Islaja, but they're no less successful in their respective genre, the genre being progressive rock. Arpeggios and gloriously emotive descending bass lines shift and shuffle beneath the kind of melodies that remind you why life's worth living. It's like La Dusseldorf and Jean Michelle Jarre had mischievous Finnish offspring with a love for the lo-fidelity naughtiness of James Ferraro.
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Älä kysy kuolleilta, he sanoivat (Fonal)
While they may not share some of their Fonal labelmates' anything goes attitudes and expansive conceptualizations of song and structure, Eleanoora Rosenholm still manage to craft some fine, forward-thinking tracks, pulling in a number of styles that never once sound forced or disjointed. The trio's second album effortlessly bounds from icy synth-pop to ambient psychedelia to heavy rock, capably showcasing a band quickly coming into their own.
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