A couple years ago I was asked: what d'ya think, what impact on the music scene will the free online labels make? There was a discussion afterwards and we came to the same conclusion - it will bring more "noise" to endless names of existing musicians, it will be harder to find pearls among tares. Truth is, it's much easier to become published on a free online label. When Windows 95 made music-making easy, cheap DSL made publishing easy. But screw "easy" things, good things never come easy. There's such thing as talent. No Windows or cable connections will help improve that matter.

Alright, I check out some online labels from time to time and how good that I do so. Because today I found one very exciting net label called OTIUM and two of its beautiful releases, really talented ones.

First one is Koan, dark quirky electronics with moods quite similar to Future Sound Of London works and Lifeforms in particular. It's a soundtrack to some imaginary land, mysterious and probably pagan. My overall impression was that the land is somewhere around russian North-East, maybe even Karelia - a land that gave the world Kalevala, a tale which was later transformed into The Lord Of The Rings. Female folk choirs gracefully interlaced with dark ambient and dub sounds, sounds of unknown rivers and definitely evil spirits. I'm much into karelian legends and haven't ever heard a better soundtrack to those places. They say their style is Ethnic Lounge but it sounds like mushroom psychedelic electronica to me - positive. Koan is a duet of yet unknown origin, they may be russians but I'm not quite sure in that. Anyway, if they go further that way, their next CD will get me in the retail outlet nearby next to Kettel, Secede and Biosphere.

The next one is the band Sounds Of Belovodye with the album Varo. Some of their track names refer to Tarkovsky's movie Stalker, sound reminds of Cirque and Substrata. And maybe Robert Rich, who also wrote an imaginary soundtrack to Stalker (the real one is by Eduard Artemiev). Full of emptyness, multidimentional echoes and hardly identified sounds, this dark ambient work builds up a strong athmosphere of uneasiness and even alarm. It's a brothers Grimm tale without words. Even a tale for electronic age. Hansel and Gretel went to a forest at midnight, the forest was full with frightening holograms, each giant mushroom had its own analogue sound generator, the witch controls the forest with a network of wi-fi cameras. That's what this album is about.

I want to assure that from a sonic and melodic points these two albums are just great. Despite the fact, as I said, they came out on net label.

In fact, free net labels may be a real future for us listeners and the industry in whole. But that's another story for another day.

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Aulis Vierhovssen
September 2005