Die Angel - Entropien I (2017)

Pan Sonic's Ilpo Väisänen, Dirk Dresselhaus (Schneider TM) and Oren Ambarchi break down to the soul of noise with a new album dedicated to Mika Vainio. If you’re into Vainio, KTL or Ilpo’s brilliant solo work under his own name or as Liima / Piiri, this one's a doozy.

Collectively, die Angel model a complex physicality through raw, elemental inputs, exploring a flux of reactive feedback processes and mutating, unstructured sonic states generated from crackling fusions of electronics, drums, electric guitar and field recordings warped and riddled with FX. They basically sound like Pan Sonic at their most intricate and visceral.

The opening Roha transcribes barely-perceptible shifts in the stereo field with the kind of molecular detail you’d expect to find on a Rashad Becker production, before Terminen Kevat and then Kitka plug into a more amplified dimension that recalls Stephen O’malley at his most contemplative and motorik.

Silvaticum harks back to a classic Pan Sonic sound - at once primitive and somehow transmitted from the future - but it’s the sloshing brownian motions on the brilliantly towering 15 minute Entropia North that tips us into billowing, white hot feedback with scintillating effect.

The amorphous results document and describe a freeness of energy travelling from body to machine and diffused across alternating acoustic environments. Each of the players here works as controlled, external variable interacting with the different acoustic conditions to tempestuous impact, convulsing between squashed, recursive diffractions to sublimated jazz drums and feedback chaos without pausing for breath...

R.I.P. Mika Vainio.