Aleksi Perälä - discussion and playlists

[zazen]

Aleksi Perala gets discussed a lot on the 'New + Upcoming releases' forum (e.g. this thread has 2000+ posts in it) but I think we could do with a thread here on the Music forum where we can talk about his stuff more generally. And maybe post playlists? If ever there was an artist that its worth making playlists for, its Aleksi.

A recap for those who might be new to AP:

Aleksi Perala was originally on Rephlex as Ovuca some 20 odd years ago (e.g. check out Afternoon Girl from 2001 ). Around 2013 Aleksi and Grant Wilson-Claridge came up with "Colundi" which is a set of 128 specially chosen frequencies that make an alternative microtonal tuning/set of scales within which to create music. Since then he's worked exclusively on making music with Colundi and has released a huge amount of it - over 100 albums of material since 2013.

He explains his prolific output in this 2021 interview:

Quote

 

"I make music every day. That’s my routine ... 12 hours a day sometimes. That’s all I do. And I find it’s my thing to do. At least what I should be doing"

"... but an obvious question is: aren’t you afraid that it can be counterproductive to release too much at once?"

"No, not at all, no. Because I don’t think about stuff like that. I never think about stuff like my career or something. I’m not that kind of a person. I’m more like a nature child or whatever. I just do what I’m supposed to do. Or 'what is my place in this universe?' I am just following my calling, it’s natural to me."

"But I mean, aside from the business side of things, aren’t you afraid that some really good tracks are going to get lost in an ocean of other tracks?"

"They already are! (laughs) It’s already too late… No, I don’t mind anymore. It’s like life: we have so many things, humans produce so much already. Where do you draw the line? I am just really enjoying what I do. And I like to share it. Simple as that. Smile with the universe!"

 

So he puts out a lot of music. Often there are some great tracks there, they get released without fanfare or explanation and then he's moving ever forwards and working on the next thing. And the track names are all numerical ids like FI3AC2139340, which makes it hard to remember which is which, and hard to discuss them. I can tell you that FI3AC2039070 is a banger, but thats not much use to you unless I also provide a hyperlink.

And so, WATMM, I think there's some important work to be done here, sifting through everything and sharing recommendations and playlists with each other.

In late 2020 he released a series of 16 Albums/EPs called Midnight Sun, so I'm going to start with that

Midnight Sun

"Midnight Sun was all for Finland, the Finnish nature and the beauty here and the fact that we have something called “midnight sun” up here. At midsummer, you have to go to northern Finland to actually witness the midnight sun. With my wife, we went to see it last summer, it was awesome. I don’t think people realize that very much. I get the impression whenever I’m in Central Europe that people seem to think of Finland as a cold and dark place, which it is in the wintertime, but in summer, it’s the opposite. We have more light than the rest of Europe and it can be very hot up here as well"

Midnight Sun and some of the series that come after it have a lot of tabla-style sounds and rhythms. I found this explanation attached to a grant that a Finnish Lift company awarded to Aleksi:

"In this project I plan to use Colundi Frequencies to model physical instruments and materials. First, I analyze the sound I've chosen using Fourier analysis, a visual equalizer and my tuning ear. I calculate the ratios of the sine waves in the sound and their averages. Then I digitally build the sound of my chosen instrument part by part using colundi frequencies based on my tuning systems. I have found that the sounds of indigenous percussion instruments are best suited for this, as their upper notes are not harmonic in the usual way"

The whole of Midnight Sun is 134 tracks lasting 13 hours, I spent a few weeks listening to it and made this playlist of my favourites. Its 30 songs, 2h52m, you can think of it perhaps as a long double album. I've kept the original ordering and included at least one track from each of the 16 releases:

 

Edited April 25 by zazen

[toaoaoad]

"GAIA 11" is incredibly good, from start to finish. Can't say much for the rest of them.

 

Edited April 25 by toaoaoad
added embed

[Wunderbar]

these are peacful

[chenGOD]

It's so mental to me that he got a grant from a Finnish Elevator company to fuck around with FFT transforms.

Anyways, colundi everyone!

 

[auxien]

would be a good case for an artist sub forum… .  .  .   .    .    .

 

Spoiler

so i can mute it 

 

[dr lopez]

 

 

remember this sick track?

[chenGOD]

So you can make playlists on Bandcamp but not share them...I made a playlist called Colundi Every1 with the first track from every Aleksi album in my bandcamp collection (which is pretty fucking far from all of the music he's released) and it ended up being 53 tracks and almost 5 hours lol.

13 hours ago, dr lopez said:

 

 

remember this sick track?

Fantastic track and album Mental Union 2 is so lush.

[cichlisuite]

i know some of you might not like this, but i love Alithia, Sunshine and Gaia albums for creative work

[zazen]

A few more things about Midnight Sun:

I think sharing playlists is the way forwards, but outside of Spotify its hard to find a shareable playlist format. But @chenGOD has chivvied me on to try and find a non-Spotify alternative, so here is the Midnight Sun Spotify playlist I shared above as a portable .m3u playlist:

midnightsun_highlights.m3u

If you put this playlist in the parent folder above the folders of mp3s, and assuming you have a folder per album and foldernames/filenames are based on the download zips from Bandcamp, then it should correctly find the right tracks. If not, try a bit of search/replace.

@dr lopez also has a Spotify playlist of Midnight Sun Faves and it only overlaps about 25% with my one, so I guess he's coming at it from a slightly different angle, do check that out too:

Also if you really want to spend a few days (well 13 hours) going through the whole of Midnight Sun this is a Spotify Playlist of the whole thing.

Another way to try and make sense of the huge volume of tracks is to look back through the Midnight Sun release thread, so here's my

Release Thread Recap®

The thread was started on 5th December 2020 by  @pabs - "This is special"
The first page of the thread had lots of positive impressions of the new direction
By 18th December (13 days later) the third installment (2 B) had dropped, leading @Braintree to say "GODDAMNIT"
By 27th December the fourth volume was out and people started to complain - some saying Aleksi could have done more editing, several people complaining of fatigue
However volume "4 A" then dropped to acclaim from @pabs, @Hugh Mughnus, @sherkaner, @Braintree, @khov and @Extralife
By 15th Jan 2021, Midnight Sun 4 - EP 1 was released and people speculated that there might be 8 releases in total, based on @cear's stitching of the cover art.
By 26th Feb, 13 volumes had been released and people were flagging.
@kuniklo: Surely he’s taking the piss at this point.
@species8472: huge fan. but agree. my enthusiasm is non existent at this point.  
@Extralife: Yeah I stopped about three releases ago.  Can't keep up.
@Richie Sombrero: It's actually starting to piss me off.
@ascdi correctly points out: "lol this thread went from OMG BEST COLUNDI YET to total disgust with the amount of music being released in like 3 pages "
People started pining for the Mental Union days
Finally on March 6th the final volume Midnight Sun 6 was released.
Looking at the thread as a whole there seems a good consensus that Midnight Sun 2 A, Midnight Sun 4 A and Midnight Sun 6 were the best releases to buy as albums

In other news: Aleksi Perala is doing a live set in London next week on June 7th at The Fold

also Oscillations 1 and 2 which was a vinyl release from a few years ago is now up on Bandcamp