Muurahaiset by Circle

At the height of the forest folk boom in 2002, the yearning for more manna for the ears led a group of aficionados to invent a programmable forest folk generator software that would then relentlessly spit out the magic sound. Later, the tapes produced by the software went missing for two decades until rediscovered by J. Lehtisalo, who was one of the concept creators and programmers along with S. Pekkola and V. Puhakka.

Among the missing tapes was Circle’s album Muurahaiset (Finnish for ‘ants’), which consists of a whirlwind of randomly generated field recordings and studio tones, all in a flurry of low-tuned acoustic stringed instruments and spacious crackles of tape hiss occasionally tapering off to spoken word segments in Finnish, creating a soundscape that invites forest folk fans on a quest for idly titillating eardrum euphoria.