Stark and stretched out, like the frozen tundra of Pan Sonic's native Finland, Aaltopiiri journeys along the strange, twisting paths of a minimalist and intensely ambiguous digital landscape. The band's approach, as with 1999's A, has few connections with traditional concepts of rhythm, instead luxuriating in the ambient netherworlds inhabited by Aphex Twin on sparse records such as Selected Ambient Works, Vol. 2, or the music of composer Philip Glass. In seeking out the furthest abyssal reaches of what we call techno, the band sheds all pretence of cohesiveness, revelling in the cold mystery at the heart of ambient music. It is left up to you to fill in the blanks, and that makes this record as good, or as bad, as your own imagination allows. --Matthew Cooke