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Well this was a weird piece of music. A full-length LP, 2 track "EP" from Jussi Lehtisalo, one of the leaders of the legendary Finnish kraut/psych/glam/heavy-rock ensemble CIRCLE - a band I've hardly listened to, but who blew me away completely when they played my town a few months ago with their cosmic groove fusion of Faust, Magma and Van Halen. This is Lehtisalo's second solo release it seems, after about a thousand different projects besides CIRCLE.

These interludes sort of leave the listener floating in that shapeless limbo between sleeping and awakening, where the shapes of the objective world flows into the formless subjective dreamscapes. As bizarre and disjointed these narratives appear, there is nothing that hinders the half-awake, half-asleep listener to grasp the deeper logic and reasonability behind it, even though, a few minutes after, you wake up wondering, what the hell was that? Which is how this record works. Why was I visited by Faust (the band and the fictional character, at once, in one), in the shape of turning cogwheels? Why was there a Finnish ogre rambling and chanting Gregorian? Why did a Glockenspiel grindcore band just drag me down to a calm beach where the slow movement of the ocean slushes me blissfully back and forth? It just rattles and hums all about you, sci-fi synthesizers and rock&roll riffs and whatnot. And mind you; there is nothing that's ostentatiously trying to be "weird" or "wacky" in these compositions.

There's no use trying to explain exactly what it sounds like. You could list every sound and instrument, timbre and effect, every little reference popping into your head trying to hook on to something a bit more real, but why bother? Just like a dream sequence - and I'm sorry for putting even more weight on one of the most used up clichés in the album review genre - but like a dream sequence, it just doesn't mean anything. But while deep inside of it, it makes such perfect sense that reality's objective lack of logic and order feels like a pretty damn boring thing afterwards.

aVoid

TRACKLIST: A. Caterpillars B. Here Come The Cranes