Dendermonde by Otso Aavanranta

Dendermonde represents an ambitious encounter between acoustic and electronic elements, mixed together in a unique and hybrid sound territory, oriented towards psychedelia and post- rock.

This album is the result of an experimentation that aims at creating a bridge between electroacoustic music and blues. It is crossed in its entirety by analog hiss and crackles, noises, and field recordings. All of this finds a centre in the sound of guitars, sometimes acid, sometimes ethereal, yet always used with parsimony.

This is coloristic music, almost visual. According to Otso Aavanranta, color represents the main element of music composition, before melody, harmony and rhythm.

For the Finnish artist, music is a key to access to transcendence. From this point of view, Dendermonde can be defined as a project of technological shamanism, born to invoke the spirits of the past, in order to enter in communion with them, and to live our own life in spiritual continuity with past lives, real or imaginary.

It is a nomadic album, recorded and mixed between Quebec, Swiss, Belgium, and Finland.

As far as the bear mask is concerned, this mask represents an intermediate entity, as such capable of communicating with the spirit of the ancestors, to offer them the music of Dendermonde. By the way, in ancient Finnish language “Otso” means “bear”.

"At the very crossing of indietronica and free form, “Dendermonde” is nourished by the contrast between ingenuity and enthusiastic outburst, and between norms and poetical freedom." – Blow Up Magazine

"Would you like an exciting trip into the unknown?" – Nowamuzyka

"The multiplying layers on each track glitch in and out of consciousness like an oriental fever-dream. This is an impressive body of work that I have become progressively enamored with." – Sigil of Brass

Otso Aavanranta is an omnidirectional researcher of all things sonic.
A man of many faces and many places,
he carefully crafts his patterns of sound and thought in between salient categories, in yet uncolonized territories.

otsola.org