Sami Sänpäkkila runs the Fonal label, one the central imprints of the contemporary Finnish underground, but he is much more than simply an everloving source for the work of his contemporaries. As Es – aka Experimentak Songcycles - he has released a clutch of albums that feature some of the most profoundly psychedelic mesmerism to come out of the scene to date.
Last year´s Kaikkeuden Kauneus Ja Käsitämättömyys was his best yet, a blasted assemblage of looped choral vocals and nebulae of interstellar fug that had little in common with the prevalent faux-naif folk music that passes for much of the new underground´s exports. Es´s new, preposterously titled but beautifully packaged double albim Sateenkaarisuudelma/ Maailmankaari / Pianokaari sees Sami drift even further into his own personal orbit with a series of exactingly assembled minimalist contructs that echo previous masters like Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Fripp & Eno without ever sounding like mere genre exercises. Across the first two sides of vinyl, he assembles bent, concentric pools of piano, vocal chant, brain-huffing reeds and electronics that hover like clouds around the base of your skull, with individuals cells dissolving into stoned reveries that sound closest to Neu´s landlocked paeans to the ocean on the first side of Neu! 75.
The third and fourth sides are little more roughly-rendered, with the third featuring a dense forest of scrabbling strings navigated with the help of Miram Goldberg and jeffrey Alexander of Black Forest/Black Sea, and the fourth a dislocated accumalition of the electric guitar´s more allusive vectors. But it´s the first two sides you´ll keep coming back to, a massively charged globe of trance that is as psychoactive and hermetically encoded as modetrn minimalist classics like Yshi Wasa´s Off the Wall and Richard Youngs´s Advent.

- DAVID KEENAN, WIRE DEC 2005