Aaltopiiri offers the listener a wide range of flowing, atmospheric sounds and rhythms. Recorded at their studio in Barcelona, the pair choose an improvising approach to recording their music. “When we are in the studio everything is recorded straight on to tape. We might do several takes of a song, but there are no overdubs,” explains Mika. They mainly record on analog equipment, some of which is designed and built for them by long time friend, Geri Lehtinen, a physics expert. “For me the most important thing in our music is the sound itself,” says Mika. “The structure is secondary. For different kinds of tracks, of course, we’re looking for different kinds of sounds. But I still don’t know myself what is in a sound that attracts me. There’s some kind of nature in the sound itself, some kind of information.”

Aaltopiiri is an album filled with alluring, ambient frequencies and hypnotic rhythms. Tracks like Kone and Kierto stutter and groove, while elsewhere Aanipaa and Liuos provide lush, addictive pulses. They are often asked what the track & album titles actually mean when translated into English, but as they often invent or combine Finnish words, the “definitions” become quite vague. For example, a legendary, maybe mythological low creeping mist from a particular area of Finland or a variant technological term for a certain aspect of early radio wave experiments.

As Mika says, “There is no theory for Pan sonic. We have no plan. We just make the music.”

Mika Vainio and Ilpo Vaisanen formed as Panasonic in 1994 a hundred miles west of Helsinki in their hometown of Turku, Finland. Originally a three piece with Sami Salo, they have not only lost a member but also a letter in their name. Now known as Pan Sonic, due to intervention from the Japanese electornic corporation in 1997.