Audiopile Review: Wildly prolific Finnish producer Aleksi Perälä compiles a best of set from his 2022 Cycles series, which were initially released digitally through his extensive Bandcamp page. The Cycles series arrived during a time of massive creative output for Perälä, issuing a new full length every two weeks during the height of COVID sheltering, a pace that essentially hasn’t waned to this day. As of this writing, he’s currently up to 16 volumes of his 2024 Children of Light series! While he might be best known to old school IDM heads as the man behind Ovuca and Astrobotnia, those who have kept up with his prodigious outpouring of releases surely know that Perälä has been hyper-focused on the Colundi Sequence, an alternative tuning scale that he developed alongside Grant Wilson-Claridge, the co-founder of Rephlex Records. Without getting too into the technical weeds here (it’s above our pay grade, tbh), the Colundi Sequence’s scale is supposed to have a notable effect on the human body with its 128 resonant frequencies. Though that may sound somewhat academic and a bit woo-woo, Cycles isn’t a staid exercise in theory. Instead, Perälä has created spine-tingling braindance for the 21st century that’s both complex and soothing, landing somewhere between the polyrhythmic ritual of gamelan and Japanese Environmental Music, funnelling it through a prism of intricate IDM. Each track is essentially made up of interlocking rhythms and chiming melodies that fall in and out of sync with each other, creating full immersive and hypnotic interzones. A sort of healing IDM balm, if you will.

Inspired by The Twelve Ornaments, a group of ancient Chinese symbols and designs associated with auspicious qualities and virtues, Aleksi uses the colundi scales to heal and inspire with this specially blended collection of tracks. The power of repetition paired with the selected frequencies makes for a transcendent ambient experience.