Press Release for HOAX by Amnesia Scanner & Freeka Tet

From the desk of Jak Ritger: I had the immense honor of doing a little music industry PR for one of my all time favorite bands, Amnesia Scanner. They teamed up again with crazy mfer, Freeka Tet, for a wild conceptual project that really ripppps. K8 and I have had it on repeat for the past month and now you get to experience it. So without further ado... For Immediate Release: ASFT HOAX!

Amnesia Scanner and Freeka Tet announce conjoined dual album on PAN. Share new double single ‘AS DISCO’ with a music video and it’s counterpart ‘FT Disco (Active noise cancelling script)’ single stream links / album pre-order

Mutating out of the collaborative practice established on previous album STROBE.RIP, Amnesia Scanner and Freeka Tet are so back with a new dual record project that explores and explodes norms of music production, songwriting and sonic aesthetics. HOAX is *not* an album and remix released together, but rather, a singular experience unfolding as two mirroring, mutually-reinforcing (or perhaps deconstructing) records.

The Amnesia Scanner “AS HOAX” record administers the liquid drip of devastating ballads, wandering mosh-ups and industrial flood lights that we fiend for. But, as with every AS record it is impossible to mistake the grunged-out doom for nihilism: there is simply too much raw emotion, vulnerable narrative and playful experimentation. With drums and chaos from Freeka on four “ASFT” tracks, AS has delivered perhaps 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 Freeka Tet’s “FT HOAX”. This is the debut full-length record released under the Freeka Tet moniker. It is a conceptual art piece that is unapologetically immediate. Using custom bashed scripts the AS 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 for eliminating environmental sounds is turned inwards 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 you to a serene contemplative plateau. The dual mirrored records are meant to be unlocked together: listening to the drone-ification opens up patterns and movements previously hidden, your newly trained ear will go deeper into the layers of subliminal encoding on HOAX leaving you reprogrammed.

The lyrics are a sticker suspended above reflective abyss: labeled ingredients are anchors that pull a connection out of the crashing shores of Oracle’s baritone sax croning and operatic countertenor samples from latent space. The resulting They Live glasses that are ripped from your eyes makes this dual record project a scathing polemic on state of music and creativity, thus raising the stakes of what it means to be an artist in the post-post-post-digital-crypto-AI-utopia-anthropocene.

‘AS Over’ and ‘FT Over (Active noise canceling script)’ is the first dual single from the project, released in August, the hooky mantra late summer anthem caused a stir with provocatively minimal AI-generated visuals of cursed plastic debris cruising the streets of stock-video-opolis. The lyrics “riding waves of discontent / Wondering where the feeling went” set-up the turbulent hero’s journey for HOAX.

On ‘AS Amygdala’ anxiety turns to blissful release. A bender leaves us marooned on ego-death island, as a saccharine more-emo-than-emo vox shuffles back to a lost corporeality with “Who’s body this, not mine? / Five more days and body still said no.”

The second single, ‘AS DISCO’ drops the gabber hammer with an unrelenting “Disco- Disco- Disco-nnect the Brain.” Extreme piercing machinery blooms into a happy hardcore glow-up soon to be damaging club sub-bass-thumpers and high-schooler skullcandy alike.

On ‘AS U,’ Animatronic Ed Sheeran’s fusion core is slowly fading at the year 100 million BCE.

‘AS Back’ staggers through the stages of grief or maybe it’s Dante’s inferno as we scavenge for breadcrumbs out of the Dark Forest. “Numb the senses / Time changes in my absence”

FT HOAX snaps to life at the first instant. The triple-fried waveform debris cocoons the listener in deep resonation and ASMR-worthy velcro timbres. Time slows in this Near-Death-Experience as AS HOAX flashes before your ears. Memories of the record appear as faded imprints. All the anxieties, longing and elation is washed away now as you are pulled out of time, into a liminal space. Does it last for days, weeks or seconds? Who can say. FT HOAX’s building drone passages rumble and pan back and forth pulling you in deeper. The earworms decompose your echolalia leaving your brain refreshed and ready for another spin.

BIOS:
Amnesia Scanner is the Berlin-based Finnish duo Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala. Founded in 2014, the group’s scope encompasses music writing, production and performance as well as its creative staging and circulation. AS has become known for their genre-generating inventiveness. Their releases often gain a cult following among influential musicians and taste-makers, going on to shape the sound of music in the ensuing years. This influencing-the-influencers position has solidified their status as a must-have electronic festival act, often headlining with a new stage production using novel technology such as animatronics or audience participation via airdrop. In releasing music, AS has taken divergent approaches using bleeding edge developments in art and aesthetics to serve an overarching narrative.

Ville Haimala, independently, has also written and produced music for and with FKA Twigs, Holly Herndon and Anne Imhof among other artists. Recently, he was spotted in the studio with Dorian Electra among others.
Martti Kalliala is an architect, cultural critic and co-founder of the creative think tank Nemesis. The duo has presented mind-bending A/V performances at world class art venues such as Tate Modern, The Art Institute of Chicago and Palais De Tokyo.

Past Releases: 2014, Amnesia Scanner released their transformative debut mixtape AS Live [][][][][]. The duo interlaced a data-rich mesh of grime, trap, and rave with a machinic narrator for their critically acclaimed 2015 audio play Angels Rig Hook, and Lexachast, their cyberdrone audio-visual project with artist Harm van den Dorpel and Bill Kouligas. Two EPs for Young (AS and AS Truth) followed in 2017, furthering the duo’s imaginative capabilities to project immersive sonic worlds into a dark, rave abyss. In their first LP, Another Life (2018, PAN), as well as in their 2020 full-length encore for the same label, Tearless, avant-EDM tropes are contextualized within the broader discourse of pop formalism, juxtaposing the duo’s harsh, deep-fried, synthetic signature style with canonical structures of pop songs. In 2023, Amnesia Scanner joined Freeka Tet to release STROBE.RIP continuing to mess with signs and signifiers of the sonic world.

Freeka Tet is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, programmer, and performer who lives and works in New York City. Using emergent technology, creative coding, and a hacker’s approach to artistic production, he creates works that interrogate and subvert contemporary attitudes toward cultural consumption. Behind the scenes, Freeka works as a “creative mercenary” to provide consulting and direction to global acts and household names.

In 2020, his video-chat-hack performance piece “7h3 p1c7u23 0f f4c371m3” was released publicly after being developed onstage at MUTEK, Miami Art Basel and at Montreal Art Biennale 2018. In 2021, Freeka lent his mischievous eye to support Aphex Twin’s “/afx\/weirdcore\blockscanner” release. He hacked the video experiment, embedding hidden and changing secrets within the digital music object. Following on the heels of the STROBE.RIP, Freeka’s AS collaboration, he created a breakout hit visual production for Oneohtrix Point Never featuring a music video “A Barely Lit Path” and a Iive show consisting of a live miniature puppet show tableaux vivant in 2023-24.

Freeka’s work on OPN’s “Again” release on Warp, Aphex Twin hack, and his collaborations with Amnesia Scanner have cemented his status as a raucous innovator pushing the creative field forward one prosthetic limb at a time. FT HOAX sees Freeka Tet translating his signature minimal-yet-explosive approach to visuals to the world of sound. But, he is no stranger to the music performance space. He has released a remix of “Vista” by Jackson and His Computer Band via Warp in 2013 and has toured with Bill Kouglas as a noise two-piece. In 2005 he put out an electronic slash deathmetal record as one-half of the band GAZORMASS. Freeka Tet’s raucous and defiantly left-field sonic experimentation lends context to FT HOAX’s subversiveness.

CREDITS
Amnesia Scanner – HOAX
Written / Produced by Amnesia Scanner
ASFT RUFF, ASFT TAZZIE, ASFT ISSOK, ASFT ICAROS, written and produced by Freeka Tet & Amnesia Scanner
Drums on ASTF TAZZIE & ASFT ISSOK by Freeka Tet
Mixed by Amnesia Scanner
Additional mixing on AS OVER by Enyang Urbiks
Mastered by Enyang Urbiks

Freeka Tet – HOAX
Iterated by Freeka Tet based on the material written by Amnesia Scanner
ASFT RUFF, ASFT TAZZIE, ASFT ISSOK, ASFT ICAROS, written and produced by Freeka Tet & Amnesia Scanner
Drums on ASTF TAZZIE & ASFT ISSOK by Freeka Tet
Mastered by Enyang Urbiks

Cat. No PAN148 – All rights reserved
℗ & © PAN 2024