4 out of 5

Label: Aleksi Perälä

Producer: Ovuca

As he did with his Astrobotnia digital release, Aleksi gathered up some old tracks recorded under a particular pseudonym and put them out for the public’s consumption.  The ‘Botnia album was pretty amazing, but telling as a template for the future.  ‘Short Attention Span’, on the other hand, despite being comprised of many one minute or less than a minute tracks, manages to bridge the gap between Ovuca’s early playful work and the quieter, bubbly stuff of his later career.  In fact, it might actually be my favorite Ovuca recordings for that very reason.

I should humbly note that the review over at http://www.brainchops.net/ pretty much says everything I want to about this.  But I’ll mumble some things in my own words.  First is that it’s quite amazing that the wealth of sounds here came only from a couple old snyths.  I know that know-how with the tools is part of the game, and that ‘synthesizers’ are pretty aptly named, but a lot of these things get keyboarded up and then chopped and rearranged on the computer, but supposedly SAS was done straight.  Perhaps this adds to the listenability.  Perhaps other Ovuca records were given the same treatment, but to my ears, the earlier ones (Lactavent and Onclement) were picked up and spun around, snippet tracks that never held much weight, and the more ambient album – Wasted Sunday – on the other side of the fence, being a bit too smooth and rounded.  Even if some of ‘Span’s tracks are just ideas, though, they get more fleshed out than some madly produced epics by similar artists on records o’er the land, peppering a catchy beat with unique keyboard plucks or rhythms.  Also not appearing is the, hm, dumb aspect that I got from Ovuca, where (besides ‘Sunday’) the artist was just playing around most of the time, evidenced by the silly sounding names and poppy cover art.  SAS has a sense of fun to it, absolutely, skittering through jazzyish tracks to more finger-snappin’ stuff like ‘Vicky Don’t Eat Fish.’  But it’s enough of a difference where these songs don’t come across as purposeful goofs.

The second ‘amazing’ tags onto that in terms of the scope of feelings the 31 songs shuffle through.  It touches on most elements from the Rephlex catalogue except, maybe, the straight dancehall / house kinda’ stuff – ambient workout, beat heavy, IDM experiments – and instead of just splattering it out unevenly, these ‘never meant for an album’ tracks flow (mostly) seamlessly together, and feel clumped in segments, gelling the tempo up and down to keep the listener tuned in.

Now, for all that, it still is something of a loose ends collection, and some moments can’t help but feel like it, the song ending suddenly or perhaps never fully finished, the beats falling off at the very end.  Oddly, if it had been handed to me with a bow on and I was told this was the finished product, I’d probably accept it as the artist’s vision to keep it all discordant.  But knowing what we know, it takes ten or so tracks of 30 second bleeps to get the feel of things down, and to settle in for a more effective listen.

Worth whatever you pay, ‘Short Attention Span’ gives me further appreciation for the Ovuca moniker, which otherwise didn’t get much playtime for me.