James Reipas

Uwaga

Freakdance (Finland)

And then every now and again, something comes along which makes you deliriously happy. 2001’s This Is Not In Fashion was a long time ago, and back then I remember loving it and wondering quite how most psytrance could call itself psychedelic with a straight face. But maybe this is psychedelic in the same way that Emerson Lake and Palmer is; or something. Live instruments combine with midi, possibly inside a washing machine… you can’t tell, it’s that sort of album.

We Are Not Intelligent is a creeping, slomo stomp knee-deep in paranoid electro. It puts me in mind of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, although with more elves than zombies. Baltic Sea is a fucking corker – sounding like Kraftwerk on finnish mushrooms. The production is pure 80s, sheeny shiney psychedelic music. It’s just gorgeous, and one I intend to play out whenever I have an excuse to do so. Rightto edges it to a more conventional psy pattern, but still maintaining this glorious electro sheen that sounds very, very good right now.

Kashahum sounds like it was lifted from Jean Michelle Jarre’s subconscious while he was asleep after having a bit of a heavy K session. The sounds are just off the scale here, seriously. It sounds like the theme tune to one of those morbidly utopian post-Tron films in the 80s. Staggering. Rauma is a more stuttered approach, as though the soundtrack to Warriors was being recreated by R2D2 and his mates (they play the Mos Isely Cantina every second Thursday, 8pm till 10.) Nopsakka is unbelievable, I can’t even think of anything to liken it to.

Think the digitally downloaded brains of The Prodigy and The B52’s, collaborating to make music that bits of old computers can breakdance to. Then, it turns into the love theme from Bladerunner as retold by Speak N’ Spell and BigTrak.

None of which quite prepares you for the somewhat unsettling Creatures. Twisted vocal spouts twisted words, while a persistent bottomend pumps along. Screams and whistles and funk wash in over the top… it’s ker-wality, but one hopes Mr Reipas doesn’t have any children. Nature Of Reipas Part III is in a similar vein… think young Gamma Goblins on a school trip to Chessington World Of Adventures. The music shifts from quirky laugh-along-a-reipas to a sort of “house piano riff with special needs”, all gleefully sounding, like the first album did, a bit like the music on the Rainbow Road level on Mario Kart.

Why Does It Always Have To Be New sounds like fin-de-ciecle, closing time music… or the end of a rather bizarre film in which Pingu and Mr Bean join the Finnish football team to thrash Brazil 16-1 in the final of the World Cup. And then things go weirder still, with the 168,000-BPM Midnight Valssi, another shockingly shocking tune that has no regard for your wellbeing, no regard for your sanity, and no regard for your Auntie, which it recently defecated on after a date went wrong. Despite this, you like it for being a manically psychedelic tune with a muted trumpet lead, a scando-folk-waltz midsection, not forgetting the thrash metal stab at the end. Syntikkaihme sounds like Finland hosting the Winter Olympics and the Reipas man in the house providing the soundtrack to some ghastly opening ceremony, meanwhile my neighbours think I’ve finally gone fully bonkers with this Clannad-on-DMT coming out my windows.

With Return at the end starting out Tangerine Dream and then morphing eerily into a full-throttle electrofunk workout, you feel that something of a milestone has been reached. You won’t be able to mix it with your identikit Nanoalchemysolsticespun-mega, but that’s the point. Gneuinely psychedelic, genuinely fresh, genuinely essential. And I had fun reviewing it.

10