Brainchops :: The Braindance Blog

Ovuca
Short Attention Span
[Aleksi Perälä :: 2011]

Bandcamp Release

If you thought you'd never get another Ovuca release, you're in for a nice surprise.  Aleksi Perala has pulled out a slew of Ovuca tracks from deep within his musical archive, circa 1998 in fact, and set them free in a self-released LP called Short Attention Span, the first Ovuca release in 10 years.

In a news post on his website Aleksi tells us these tracks are a continuation of the experimental sounds heard in Lactavent and Onclements, and if you're familiar with these first two albums, it should come as no surprise that many of the 31 tracks included in Short Attention Span are between 30 seconds to a minute and a half long.  Though all the tracks were made on his simple 1998 setup mainly consisting of a Roland XP-80 and Akai MPC-2000 without the use of a computer, the album spans a pretty wide variety of beat styles and sounds.  It begins fast with atmospheric jungley IDM, moves into harder acidic dance floor ideas, veers into some oddball stuff and then begins to slow down with a few reverbed out jazzy interludes, eventually dwindling into beautiful ambience.  A few of the shorter clips such as "Hey Bob" (0:11) and "Beta Force" (0:21) end a bit too abruptly, jarring the listener out of the "zone", but for the most part the whole thing flows surprisingly well like a purposefully constructed album should from start to finish.

The longer tracks, even when only something like a minute-thirty, are really the meat and potatoes here.  "Focus" is a gorgeous piece featuring fast, repetitive oil drum rhythms juxtaposed with gentle glass flute meanderings, achieving a classic early IDM feel that I wish would go on longer.  I'm really digging his use of acoustic drum kit samples like in "Jazzy 107", "Jazz Hop" and especially "Off We Go" where he cranks up the hall reverb and pairs them with some eerie pads.  Aleksi closes out with two ambient pieces, the first being "Personal Digital Sound" experimenting with what sounds like a recording in reverse overlayed by his own voice singing out a somber hymn. Final track "Luostro", which also happens to be the longest at a whopping 8:08, is a gorgeous new-agey meditation full of swelling synths, trailing sustains and dream-like atmosphere, with the tiniest synthesized rhythm chugging along quietly somewhere in the mix.  If you were jumping around in the track list while sampling the album, you might not understand how a gorgeous piece like this could exist on the same release as a goofy, fun track like "Vicky Doesn't Eat Fish", but when you hear the whole thing in sequential order, it all makes sense.




Buy Ovuca - Short Attention Span :: Bandcamp

Connect with Aleksi Perala / Ovuca :: Official Site | Facebook