Ozone Player: Insane Logic

Light, ethereal, airey... these are things that some folks look for in their music. To journey "beyond" the music and into the subconscious (mindless?) realm of white noise is a goal of many fans of the ambient genre. Unfortunately, chord changes that takes minutes, bird sounds, off-key samples and discordant chord structures are not usually my cup of tea, so to say that I didn't enjoy Ozone Player's Insane Logic is an understatement. To fans of the genre, Ozone Player's "songs" may invoke the types of emotions that they're looking for with its intense background droning and its swirling electronica. But to my mundane ears, Insane Logic simply sounded like a mish-mash of random synthesized sounds, and the only emotion it caused me to feel was annoyance.

Ozone Player is actually the brainchild of one man - Otso Pakarinen - who is very adept at coaxing bizarre sounds out of his vast array of electronic noisemakers. There are so many different samples bursting forth in Insane Logic that it's hard for Ozone Player to hit any sort of real "groove" in its music - the sounds get in the way more than they contribute to the compositions. This is extremely apparent on the track "Praise" where the obnoxious keyboard samples completely destroy any chance this techo-ambient piece had of ever getting off the ground. The opening track "Whales in Fog" also suffers from a poor choice of samples, and REALLY gets mired down in its repetitiveness and its overall lackluster presentation.

There are a couple of spots on Insane Logic that almost achieve interesting status - "Warezz" and "A Shortcut to Nowhere" are a couple of decent attempts at techno-style music that with a little aggressive drum programming could have been more successful. But other than those two tracks, there's really nothing all that exciting on Insane Logic. Buyer Beware!

More information on Ozone Player can be found at http://www.ozoneplayer.com