With this new ?monster? release, a 4 CD box called ?Kesto?, Pan Sonic shows their diverse sides in one release. The box contains four CD?s, individually packed in a cardboard slipcase with track information. These CD?s come inside a simple square box.
The music on the CD?s is incredibly varied. The first two discs contain the more rhythmic oriented material that is typical of Pan Sonic?s older albums. The material sounds a lot more minimal than on their latest releases (?aaltopiiri? and ?a?). While the material of these previous albums showed a lot of refinement, and an almost ?idm? influenced approach, the new tracks seem to be put together in a much shorter time. For a lot of artists, this would mean something like ?bad? or ?unfinished?, but Pan Sonic seem to be quite able to get away with that. In fact, the tracks remind me of their earlier and legendary album ?kulma?, which contained very minimal analogue pulses and beats that instantly made Pan Sonic (then called Panasonic) famous.
The other two discs contain ambient tracks that are quite similar to the solo works of Mika Vainio (on Touch and Wavetrap) and Ilpo Vaisanen (on Mego). One of the discs contains 8 tracks, while the other only contains one. The material of both discs contains a lot of analogue ?knob-twisting? experiments, as well as some recorded environmental sounds. This results in long synthetic drones and more electro-acoustic sounding compositions (with the occasional silence as well as the occasional sudden burst of noise).
This release is certainly very demanding for your concentration, the material is certainly way too much to grasp in one listening sessions and took me some weeks to come to terms with (hence the late review ;-). However, it is an immense listening experience, and certainly did not disappoint me (which I kind of expected considering its length).
