A good and dear friend of mine, Helsinki based Omnitorn (@the-omnitron) was kind enough to take the time and provide DR with a sublime free-flowing genre-crossing mix!

On the platter, we have everything from acidic electro to distorted techno to swirling breakbeats, a selection where his IDM-roots shine through. In his own words:

“With this mix, I wanted to capture the variety of sounds and moods that keep me interested, keep me moving. Turns out, I ended up with a mix quite heavy in acid and electro.
What often keeps me interested in DJ mixes these days is the ability to bridge between different genres and styles — not to stick to just one sound, but keep the audience slightly on their feet about what’s coming next.

Speaking of sounds, I guess in this mix one can hear my background as a bit of an old IDM / braindance nerd.

Like so many of us, during the early ’90s, when I was in my teens, I was first hugely affected by the techno sound that seemed to become so popular over a fortnight. First I was consuming all the techno, hard trance and hardcore I could get my hands on, but soon fell out of love as I was somehow bored by the repetitiveness of if all. That’s when I think I first discovered FSOL and a bit later Aphex Twin, and the love for their more experimental soundscapes has remained through all these years.

A few years later when I moved to a much smaller city on a totally different side of Finland to study, I got a bunch of new like-minded friends who were majoring in the same subject as I was and were similarly into all things weird, arty and avant-garde. That affection was not limited to music but spanned over other things like movies and art as well.
Weirdly, despite spending most of our time skipping classes and listening to IDM (or trying to desperately mimic that sound with Jeskola Buzz), we were not buying too many records. Mainly, because we were all students and thus broke. Lucky for us, two things existed. First: the town we were living in had probably the best public music library in all of Finland. Second: the emergence of broadband and free P2P sharing.
During those years the whole world of more experimental music started to really open up for me. Through my mates, I discovered other Warp & Rephlex artists with all these exiting sounding names like Squarepusher, Autechre, Boards of Canada, Plaid, Cylob…
And I got exposed to all kinds of other weird stuff as well, ranging from dark ambient and krautrock to Steve Reich and Claude Debussy. I think it was some kind of rebellion, as I was really really bored with the four-on-the-floor techno at the time. Funnily enough, during those days I could not stand the sound of an unfiltered 808, a sound which I’ve later become again a big fan of.

And that’s not the only thing that has changed since early 2000s, as I’ve come to again appreciate more direct and perhaps accessible sound — and those four-on-the-floors, too. I think ‘my sound’ has become much more varied and dance friendly, while retaining some of that left field edge.

Being still a big Aphex fanboy was the reason I wanted to include one of my favourites in this mix as well. A fairly recent one, CIRCLON 1, from Cheetah EP. And later on in the mix we hear a tune by someone who obviously is a fanboy, too: ‘Roots of Techno’ by Kink, from ‘Aphex KiNK EP’.

Enjoy the show!”

Cover art from a EABE designed t-shirt (@eabemusic)