If Amnesia Scanner was an iceberg meme, you could say that their lore runs deep. The Berlin-based duo, Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala, have built an extensive online backstory that spans over ten years. The project existed purely online at first as a website, harnessing the digital chaos of the present through delirious club tracks that mutate at hyper speed, before spilling out into the IRL – their live shows bringing together frenetic sonic and visual components that feel equivalent to scrolling the feed in real-time, complete with strobing text-images that beam directly into the viewer’s brain with a memetic contagion.

Take “AS DISCO” the duo’s latest single off Hoax, their fourth studio album in collaboration with Freeka Tet (a longtime visual collaborator), the music video which features words like ‘ALGORITHM’ and ‘VIBE’ flashing violently across the screen to a violent beat. Or their track “AS OVER” with the instantly recognisable meme hook, “It’s so back/ it’s so over”. Over on the duo’s IG, a sludge clip of an AI commentator speaking about the album against a split screen featuring Freeka pushing a noise cancelling AirPod into a prosthetic ear and a boring ahh mobile game. “Oh, it’s a wild ride for sure,” says the narrator in a robotic cadence – and they’re certainly not wrong.

Hoax comprises of 22 tracks split into two mutually reinforcing parts. The first is helmed by Amnesia Scanner, featuring Freeka across four spiralling tracks, and feels as chaotic as you’d expect. In contrast, the second half is led by Freeka who uses ubiquitous technology of noise-cancelling headphones to create ambient versions of the first half – just don’t call them remixes. Using an algorithmic script to cancel out frenetic sounds, it’s a humorous spin on music production, deconstructing the existing tracks to peel back the subliminals to enter an alternative world that leaves you reprogrammed for a more serene listening experience. Below, we speak to Amnesia Scanner and Freeka Tet about the new record, the magic of the group chat, and just vibes.

So, the new album Hoax, is it an album, a remix album, or is it a sinister third thing?

Freeka Tet: It’s actually very simple compared to the first album [the three of us] did together. Instead of melting everything together, we decided to work together but keep it separate. It just sounds very different because we don’t need to fiddle around to make everything work together.

Ville Haimala: This collaboration has sprouted a wide array of work. The end result is a lot more broad.

Martti Kalliala: It feels like a new category of work in that it doesn’t neatly fit into a traditional model of what an album should be.

Freeka Tet: We’ve been working together for five or six years. When I first started out, I was mainly working on the live. It’s not usual for the creative to start [making music] with the band, so with the first album, no one was really clear on what that meant. Whereas on this album, it’s more clear about the way things work between us.

How would you describe your part of the album? Where did the whole noise-cancellation idea come from?

Freeka Tet: For the past few years, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of doing music without using music software. I wanted to limit the way I work, like just doing something using Google Chrome to bring me back to the essentials. When we decided to do a two-version album, I was working on a script on Python, and because AS is always working with this internet culture meme approach, I got really into cancel culture, and I started to think about how I can cancel music sonically without using music software tools. In the beginning, this meant using noise cancellation AirPods, but that didn’t work, so I ended up doing everything by script. The algorithm was meant to simulate what’s happening around you when you cancel the sound around you.

Back to the internet stuff. How do you all usually come up with your ideas? I’m guessing the group chat goes hard.

Ville Haimala: It doesn’t start with a mood board or some sort of concept. It’s more a shared pool of stuff, where we pull things out. It’s born out of accidents and improvisation and experimentation, like a weird ball that gets thrown back and forth. We pull ideas from each other in that sense. It’s a weird, shared mood board that floats somewhere in between these different collaborators.

One of the first ideas we were working with was treating information, whether that’s image, sonic or text, as malleable. Thinking of words as images, almost forgetting the semantic content, just using it as an image, or using a sound but completely decontextualising it

– Martti Kallialla

The Amnesia Scanner iceberg runs very deep. With this album in particular, I love the idea that there’s multiple layers or versions of reality happening all at once, it almost feels subliminal. Would you say that’s intentional?

Martti Kalliala: AS has always been very dense. I'm not admitting or denying that there’s subliminal messages in the music, but there definitely could be. There’s potential layers of meaning embedded in there. Freeka’s cancellation in some sense reveals some of the information that’s in there.

Freeka Tet: All of us share this thing where we’re looking at how tech is advancing and it’s a big part of what we do both separately and together. We have a natural tendency to look more at things that already have something subliminal in them already.

Martti Kalliala: Compression is one of the methods we use, just a lot of information, whether that’s visual or semantic, compressed into the work.

Freeka Tet: This goes into a loop, because that’s the main characteristic of a meme. Everything is compressed and re-compressed.

I’ve been thinking about the death of the image lately, like how there’s such an overwhelm of images online that the content no longer matters, instead what’s important is the vibe. It’s something I feel happens a lot in your work.

Martti Kalliala: Since the beginning, one of the first ideas we were working with was treating information, whether that’s image, sonic or text, taking the material as malleable. Thinking of words as images, almost forgetting the semantic content, just using it as an image, or using a sound but completely decontextualising it. Yeah, the vibe has always been more important to us than the official version

Since we’ve used this free association content in our live shows and work in general, since the topic of prompting has been very much more on the surface through AI-generated imagery and stuff like that, it’s the idea of prompting the brain, skipping the image as you said, and deciding that the image is only in the viewers’ cortexes that we can just prompt things into peoples’ minds directly.

Freeka Tet: The call is coming from inside the building, the image is coming from inside your head.

Yeah, I very much feel that you guys have been frontrunners in this sort of hyper-mediated thinking, which is now slowly becoming the norm across culture – this vibe economy if you will. Is that something you’ve considered in your own work?

Martti Kalliala: It’s not radical anymore to bombard people with information, because that’s basically how we live seven hours a day, doomscrolling or whatever. We’re reacting to reality with a more concentrated impact with the visuals.

Freeka Tet: There’s a lot of power on stage and it doesn’t stand with how much gear we have, because actually the stuff we have is pretty minimal. Obviously using text with solid colour in the back, there’s a lot of power in that. I see the LED screen as a powerful object, not just a screen to display content. It shows the power of the hardware more than anything else.

How do you see the relationship between the music and the live shows?

Ville Haimala: Amnesia Scanner has always been a very internet-based project, its first iteration was literally just a website. But it’s quickly turned into a bubble where you get bombarded. In the beginning, the music was extreme, and then you’d see it live, which was also very extreme. Now, the record resembles the structure of pop music and it’s more compositional. But in the live setting, it becomes extreme, even if that extremity doesn’t translate as well when you put it on Sonos in your kitchen. It has many different shapes and forms. Even Freeka’s version of the record, it’s the ultimate chill out record, the floatation tank version.

Freeka Tet: The first time we worked together was me helping out with the live, so obviously it was the common thing. I think for most electronic musicians, trying to go into a more live aspect on stage is because you don’t want to do the same shit over and over again.

Your music is constantly responding to changes in technology. I guess the main developments in recent years has been the mainstreaming of AI. What are your thoughts about this?

Ville Haimala: As for any artist, it depends on which school you are in terms of whether you see it as an existential threat or a fruitful collaborator.

I have this theory that there will be a huge new musical movement powered by AI, which would be music where there’s no musicians, literally copypasta-ghost-music. Technically you don’t need the musician when you use streaming services, so why wouldn’t you have fun music that you make with your friends without the need for a musician middleman. I’m not saying that would replace all music but I would imagine it as a new parallel culture that I would at least love to dig deeper into or experience. What kind of music can be born from a world where there’s not necessarily musicians and their egos?

I think for most electronic musicians, trying to go into a more live aspect on stage is because you don’t want to do the same shit over and over again – Freeka Tet

Freeka Tet: You remember the movie Demolition Man, where all the music they listen to comes from commercials? I think it’s kinda funny.

It makes me think of the Dead Internet Theory and how in the future the entire internet will be made up of bots, potentially leaving us humans to go back offline. At the same time, films are beginning to resemble videogames – for example, what Harmony Korine is doing with EDGLRD. Do you think music will follow a similar direction?

Freeka Tet: Videogames are a good analogy, but I think there’s a big difference between working on an album for months, which is really like a flash in time, and videogames. People are still talking about Call of Duty from 2000 and I think it has to do with the fact that they’re actors in the actual thing, not clients on a product.

Martti Kalliala: The optimistic scenario is that you have a handful of streaming platforms with slightly different media formats, where artists are able to distribute music in forms that make sense to them. To also have audience relationships that make sense to them, because [at the moment] having a relationship with your audience outside of a few platforms is next to impossible. Even if the tools are there, maintaining a relationship with fans is difficult.

Ville Haimala: But the Hoax website is going to change that.

Before we finish things off, what are your niche internet obsessions at the moment?

Ville Haimala: Kind of obsessed about the idea of being less online at the moment.

Freeka Tet: Same, but also admitting I have been obsessing over extreme prank channels on youtube that have millions of followers. I am particularly interested in how they are made and edited, the place of sponsors in it, etc. I see it as the next entertainment era that replaces the usual streaming platform.

Martti Kalliala: The work of Evan Collins on Are.na.

Hoax is out now.