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If I knew the genre term for Pan Sonic’s album Aaltopiiri  (Mute Records), would that have changed anything for me? If I knew how Pan Sonic, a Finnish duo typically recording in a Barcelona studio, created their compositions, maybe that would change my perception of this album. Like Pole’s recent work with muted percussion that ripples and dissipates and a modulated background hum comprising a core to which other sounds are added and taken away, this album takes away a number of preconceptions we might have and offers music that sounds different.

Beside Pole, Oval comes to mind and so does Autechre. But Pan Sonic does not traffic in the hard industrial percussion sounds Autechre sometimes uses. And while there are similarities to Oval, Pan Sonic occupies a space somewhere between improvisational music and computer music that seems purposefully faulty. Like the most recent Pole album (Pole3), the overwhelming impression I have of Aaltopiiri is that of slowly mutating forms. The percussion is featured prominently in the first and last thirds of the album, while the middle plays more with modulated static providing a melody of sorts. But the percussion typically has a muted quality and a dampened echo. Sounding both primordial and futuristic, the other sounds added seem modulated, dampened, and very difficult to identify: most prevalent is an insistent background hum that gradually changes tone, intensity, etc. Perhaps because of the impression I have of echoes and ripples on this album, it alludes to cavernous rooms and the elliptic space of dreams. Where Pole’s most recent album strikes me as somewhere between wistful and desperate, Pan Sonic’s album is gentler in places. It reminds me of a painter and an author: Yves Tanguy’s landscapes of futuristic metallic structures and Robbe-Grillet’s novels of spliced time and repeated actions and words.

This album is made for solitude: long solitary drives, contemplative days, and quiet hours. Listening to this music makes me want to figure out how quickly the sounds are mutating. Why are they mutating and evolving? Maybe it has something to do with music theory and Steve Reich and whatnot. Sometimes I find myself staring at the CD player trying to decide whether the sounds are very very slowly mutating or have reach a steady, nonvarying place. I look more carefully and my CD player will not tell me which song is playing-it treats the album as an hour of music. I pick up the CD case and it is red and devoid of information, i.e. no liner notes, no credits, just a picture that looks a bit like a time-lapsed solar eclipse. That seems appropriate.

Like Pole, Pan Sonic does not use recognizable instrumentation. This is neither drum ‘n bass nor improvisational jazz. It is music that very gradually evolves, mutates, changes. The closing 28 minute track “Oahu” of the second 6ths album, the 2000 Merge release Hyacinths and Thistles, features the same, a radically slow metamorphosis of an ocean wave sound, presumably Hawaiian. It is very tempting to call this postmodern. But I think it is the music of tomorrow and it makes me calm and happy.