Amnesia Scanner is the Berlin-based Finnish duo Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala. Founded in 2014, the group’s scope encompasses music writing, production, and performance, as well as its creative staging and circulation. Characterized by a deep fascination with system vulnerabilities, informational overload, and sensory excess, Amnesia Scanner carnivalizes the present. At the core of their work is an interest in how the contemporary experience is mediated, including the ways in which listening to music and live performance is evolving as streaming platforms become dominant and the feedback channels between artists and fans become more direct.

Building on their debut mixtape AS Live [][][][][], the duo interlaced a data-rich mesh of grime, trap, and rave with a mechanic narrator for their critically acclaimed 2015 audio play Angels Rig Hook, and Lexachast, their cyberdrone audio-visual project with artist Harm van den Dorpel and Bill Kouligas. Two EPs for Young (AS and AS Truth) followed in 2017, furthering the duo’s imaginative capabilities to project immersive sonic worlds into a dark, rave abyss. In their first LP, Another Life (2018, PAN), as well as in their 2020 full-length encore for the same label, Tearless, avant-EDM tropes are contextualized within the broader discourse of pop formalism, juxtaposing the duo’s harsh, deep-fried, synthetic signature style with canonical structures of pop songs. With STROBE.RIP (PAN 2023), Amnesia Scanner, joined by Freeka Tet, continues to play with the signs and signifiers, abstracting the tropes of their sonic universe.

Amnesia Scanner has performed across a wide range of venues and settings, from the massive Roskilde Festival in Denmark to Berlin’s Berghain to London’s Serpentine Galleries. For their design and visual direction, they collaborate with PWR. Ville Haimala, independently, has also written and produced music for and with David Byrne, FKA Twigs, Holly Herndon and Anne Imhof among other artists. Beyond his work with Amnesia Scanner Martti Kalliala is an architect, cultural critic and co-founder of the creative think tank Nemesis.