OZONE PLAYER (Finland)

Ozone Player is actually Finnish composer/keyboardist Otso Pakarinen, and Insane Logic is his debut release CD. He has dubbed his style "progressive techno", though this may incorrectly conjure up mental images of techno house rave music. Though there are some "dancable" tracks on the CD, the music tends to be much more "ambient" than "techno", though it's a bit too dissonant and demanding to be called "ambient" either.

Take a heavy dose of old (Phaedra/Rubycon-era) Tangerine Dream, some of the alternate tunings of Wendy Carlos, and throw in some of the nightmarish textures and cacophonies of The Residents, and you'll begin to have a flavor of the music on Insane Logic. It can be innocuously cheerful one moment, then decay into frightening darkness the next. These emotional swings make it a bad candidate for the ignorable "ambient" label. My favorites are the longer cuts, especially the 7:31 "The Reality Dysfunction".

Insane Logic isn't going to make music history with it's uniqueness. But it's not "cardboard cutout" music, either. Pakarinen has shown some imagination in developing this style. Neither "techno" nor "ambient", but a little bit of both. All instrumental synthesizer compositions, but not "new age" either (to quote Pakarinen, "I can't stand new age ..."). I'm not sure how to categorize it, but I do know I liked it.

Fred Trafton
Gibraltar Encyclopedia of Progressive Rock