MILJARD

And again there's only Chamberry's review about a Finnish experimental product. As I said on my Magyar Posse review, he succeeds to describe the music superbly and with unbelievable patience, whereas a lazier reviewer might just summarize it all in a single sentence. Miljard is indeed an album that a casual listener is tempted to handle with the least possible effort and judge it merely as nearly two hours of minimalistic Ambient, all the same from start to end. I'm not truly impressed by this music, as delicate as it is in the chosen style. It's not that it would be too strange and difficult to get into. Yes, one can say I'm lacking the PATIENCE this music requires. But I've heard this kind of music before, by Brian Eno and many other explorers of his invention, Ambient. Now, you should think only of Eno's MOST minimalistic Ambient works, and maybe the minimalistic/experimental music done earlier in the art music field (John Cage and such), not to get wrong expectations.

I haven't listened to CIRCLE before, but I read them to be very unpredictable band shifting from noisy, experimental rock to almost any kind of stuff, and this album was VERY unpredictable as a Circle album if I understood. So I guess being their long-time listener gives no other device than maybe patience to digest this 2-CD. But if you're a connoisseur of Minimalism, there shouldn't be any difficulties to enjoy this album whether or not you've heard of the group.

The tracks are from 8 to 22 minutes long with two shorter exceptions, and they all pass as 'wallpaper music', that is, with no clearly notable changes during their lengths - or between each other, to generalize cruelly. But that's probably only the surface impression. To a patient listener there is constantly some tiny sonic activity to feed one's inner visions. Forget the usual rhytmic playing of guitars, bass and drums. It's all like abstract painting that at first sight looks empty but with a closer look responds to viewer's own inner space. Chamberry described the piano notes as snow flakes touching the ground, and my impression was the same.The leaflet includes pictures of the band members on a summer cottage surroundings on a snowy winter. Not a word is given to form any exceptations of the music, and the titles don't help much either. Most of them seem like persons' names; first name, surname or an unofficial calling name.

Is it all worth of two hours is a useless question, because the sense of time is better to leave aside when listening to this kind of music. Quite possibly the band improvised and taped many many hours of material and worked the best of it into two hours, instead of stretching a handful of sonic ideas into two hours, as it might seem to many listeners.