AMNESIA SCANNER

With second LP Tearless, the Berlin duo add ominous vocal effects and metal-influenced riffs into the mix with their ‘avant-EDM’ sound. Si Truss quizzes them on their creative process...

The music that the Berlin-based, Finnish duo of Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala create as Amnesia Scanner isn’t easily categorised. Their earliest tracks, released anonymously in 2010s, combined the maximalist tendencies of American EDM with experimental structures designed to wrong-foot the listener as much as make them dance. 2018’s debut album, Another Life, was like rave music turned up to 11, throwing speaker-shaking synths and pop-vocal hooks alongside distorted digital effects and clangorous metallic percussion.

This year’s follow-up, Tearless, pushes their sound into the unknown further still, creating a bleak and apocalyptic tapestry that touches on heavy metal and drone alongside throbbing club beats and almost operatic vocals. Featuring vocal contributions from Brazilian DJ and producer Lyzza and Peruvian artist Lalita, it’s an album that makes a feature of digital alienation; held together with a through-line of vocals that sound distant, warped and ominous. We caught up with the duo for a rare interview to quiz them on how their eclectic soundscapes come together.

What was the original inspiration behind Amnesia Scanner? There seems to be a real mixture of influences at play.

“We started AS as some sort of a blank slate and a playground for us to experiment on whatever we find interesting, so there’s never been any single inspiration, rather an ever growing Frankensteinstyle fusion of different inspiration sources. We listen to stuff on quite broad scope which helps to amplify this.”

Tearless sounds like a record with a concept at its heart, but one that’s fairly abstract – can you tell us a little bit more about the themes behind the record?

“This seems to be a quite common misconception with AS records. We never really started a record with a specific concept. But our songwriting and production process flows mood and aesthetic-wise through different territories over time and if you select a group of song from a specific moment in time they tend to sound somewhat coherent with each other.”

Tell us about the studio and gear behind the new album – it sounds like quite a ‘digital’ sound palette. Is that an accurate description of the synths and instruments being used?

“AS is a very digital project, we don’t really use any analogue synths and instead we use a lot of virtual instruments, and different sampled sources which we then run through different chains of processing we’ve created over the years. We end up resampling/bouncing almost everything several times and keep massaging the WAVs until they sound the way we want.

“The only outboard tools we really use is a selection of microphones we use for recording vocals and sometimes other stuff. In the beginning of the project we also experimented with ‘bootlegging’ our own music by playing it out through a soundsystem in a venue and recording it with a Zoom recorder and then bringing those recordings back to the original session where we layered them with the rest of the music. We like binaural mics and a new favourite is a Lewitt 640.”

Tell us about how the pair of you work together creatively – do you have set roles? Do you always work together in the studio?

“We actually almost never work together in the studio, we both have quite similar setups in terms of DAW and we create demos and ideas which we send back and forth and finally bring them to Villes studio for the final production and mix.”

How much has that creative process changed since the first album?

“The creative process has stayed somewhat the same although now we have of course a much better understanding about what an AS song sounds like. We constantly keep on adding new interesting instruments and tools into our setup and similarly dropping out the ones where we feel we’ve squeezed out everything interesting.”

Some of the visual work that accompanies your music seems to make use of algorithms and randomisation – does this play any role in the music itself?

“We’ve used some algorithmic and generative sources sometimes and also like a certain randomness and unpredictability which makes things feel often uncanny and less human somehow. What we’re really even more interested are the ‘mistakes’ or artefacts created by ‘smart’ digital instruments when you push them to do something they can’t handle. We often push monophonic pitch correction tools over the edge by feeding them polyphonic information or use extreme amounts of automatic beat warping to sound sources without a clear rhythmic pattern.”

Vocals play a pretty major role on Tearless without being ‘upfront’ as you’d usually expect them, almost as if they’re meant to sound inhuman. What was the thinking behind that?

“The voice is a very central part of the project. We always wanted the project to have a recognisable voice but without having a classic ‘front figure’. This led to us creating a vocal chain which we can almost feed any vocal source and the end result sounds like ‘AS vocals’. Another thing we were always a bit allergic to was the idea of being a ‘beatmaker’ who then shops for vocalists and glues the vocal on top of their beats. That’s why we always want to bake the vocal really deep into the mix. As a fundamental part of the music.”

On a technical level, what are you using to process the various vocal parts?

“As was mentioned previously, we have a series of vocal chains consisting of multiple effects – distortion, pitch correction, formant shifting, phasing etc – that we’ve been setting up over the years. We then take the original voice material which can be recorded or sampled and we start feeding it through these different chains. These chains are then summed again. It’s a fairly complicated beast but it gives us a pretty unique toolkit for voice creation.”

Tell us about the featured vocalists…

“We had the pleasure of working in the studio with both of them, although Lalita also recorded a lot of stuff on her own. She is meticulous with her recording practice and would send us 100s of stems where she’s layering takes making these super powerful choirs out of her own voice. With Lyzza, we recorded in Berlin and used some of our vocal chains to create these cyborg moments.”

How has each of your activities outside of Amnesia Scanner influenced this record? (Haimala has worked with Holly Herndon, David Byrne and FKA Twigs)

“You always, at least subconsciously, pick up things from every project. AS nevertheless is a quite complex process and all outside ideas end up being rendered quite unrecognisable in the final music.”

Previous releases have made reference to ‘EDM’, a genre you obviously take influence from without being fully part of…

“EDM seems to be a cursed term in the ‘experimental music’ community, but we’ve been very drawn to its emphasis on maximal effectivity. The larger than life chord progressions and buildups, and of course the drops, are all interesting as tools.”

What are the plans around this album? How do you intend to present it in a live context?

“We were in the middle of building the new live show when the pandemic started. It was partly based on a performance we did in Kraftwerk, Berlin in December 2019 where we combined quite epic stage and lighting stuff with live performers, a singer and a guitarist and even some animatronics. We hope we’ll have a chance to bring this circus in front of a live audience yet…”

“EDM seems to be a cursed term, but we’re drawn to its emphasis on maximal effectivity”