UTON IS THE ONE-MAN PROJECT OF JANI HIRVONEN ORIGINALLY HAILING FROM TAMPERE AND CURRENTLY TRAVELLING AND RECORDING IN INDIA. HIRVONEN IS ONE OF THE MOST ACTIVE MUSICIANS OF THE FINNISH UNDERGROUND SCENE THAT HAS RECENTLY PRESENTED US THE LIKES OF KUUPUU, KEMIALLISET YSTÄVÄT, ISLAJA, PAAVOHARJU AND LAU NAU AND A SEEMINGLY NEVER-ENDING STREAM OF BEAUTIFUL AND HIGHLY ORIGINAL RECORD RELEASES. THE MUSIC OF UTON IS NO EXCEPTION THERE, DRAWING INSPIRATIONS FROM PSYCHEDELIA TO FREE JAZZ TO PURE ECSTATIC DRONES AND NOISES USING A WIDE RANGE OF ACOUSTIC INSTRUMENTS FROM VARIOUS PARTS OF THE GLOBE AND A BULK OF ELECTRONICS. RECORDED IN GLORIOUS LO-FI THE MYSTERY OF HIRVONEN'S SOUND IS DIFFICULT TO PINPOINT; SHEER RAVISHING BEAUTY, ELEGANCY AND VARIEGATION IS STASHED BEHIND A WALL OF GREY, INSCRUTABLE HAZE - GORGEOUS MELODIES AND VOICES, REEDS AND ALIEN SOUNDS GLEAMING THROUGH THE MIST FROM TIME TO TIME, SHIMMERING LIKE DIAMONDS THROUGH LAYERS OF DUST - Dekoder (from the label press release)

"Following their excellent CD on Digitalis, Uton deliver an album of some depth here for Dekorder. Although it follows a similar pattern of intense, beautiful guitar drone, followed by a more abstract, experimental style then back again, for me this has an excellent, cohesive feel that never alienates. When it's got you in the deeper moments, you really do get carried along with it. Lovely artwork too and a good bit of oddball music to accompany you over the coming weeks. Great stuff." - Smallfish Records

"The fact that German label Dekorder are here and ready to put some of the worlds most obscure music on vinyl (and high quality vinyl at that... no surface noise baby) makes me just that little bit happier to be alive. With labels like this out there it feels like music might be in safe hands, and with any luck they'll have the sales to justify the outlay, and certainly this latest record from Finnish psychedelic dronester Uton is well worth spending your hard-earned on. Following on nicely from his killer releases on Digitalis, 'Alitaju Ylimina' (don't ask me to translate that, please!) is a simply shocking dictat in all that is faded and tape saturated. It almost sounds like your brain has melted through the grates into a world of wood shavings and burnt polystyrene, a world where every sound is filtered through ten feet of fibreglass so your ears can only pick up traces of the melodic subtlety. I'm a big fan of Uton so it's hardly fair to comment but I think this might be his most coherent record yet, blending the more electronic, ambient sounds with the plucked folk instrumentation you might expect to hear on a Kemialliset Ystavat record." - Boomkat

"I recently read quite a fitting comment on the music of Uton stating that you listen to it and after a while you forget what you had been listening to for the last five or ten minutes. The same is true for "Alitaju Ylimina". It captures twelve compositions in five tunes which mostly feature electronics, flutes, percussion and other gadgets. And also on these five tunes Uton´s sounds are so fluid that it´s really hard to grasp and remember them. At the same time though they capture the listener completely. While some of Uton´s music can be quite boring, "Alitaju Ylimina" is among the best I´ve heard from him. The tunes contained on the LP were partly recorded in a studio and are quite opulent compared to some of his other output. The LP is split up into the "Utopia" and the "Atopia" sides, and especially the "Utopia" side features a more noisy Uton than usual. Electronic loops, distant and blurry flutes, what seems like distorted vocals, railroad sounds and tons of other sound sources join together to create a truly unholy and ghostly atmosphere.
The "Atopia" side starts out more quiet with morphing drones, violins and flutes before changing into a full force drilling noisy section. At least I haven´t heard Uton as abrasive and repelling as on this section, but it suits him quite well and makes his music more challenging. Track 2 on the "Atopia" side is less aggressive, but equally discomforting. Here, Uton uses children´s voices, adult gibberish, harmonium, some kind of wooden glockenspiel type instrument and other sound sources. The "Atopia" side ends with a percussion driven 70s type tune that has a very tribal vibe with its fierce flute playing. "Alitaju Yliminia" definitely seems to mark a change in Uton´s catalogue moving away from his minimalist dronescapes into more varied territory. It´s something that sounds well worth pursuing." - Stephan Bauer / Foxy Digitalis

"uton is the the pseudonymn of finnish national, current india traveller, and shop favourite jani hiroven. drawing influences from free noise and tonal drone experiments he is conjouring up some of the most interestingly outthere sounds this side of 2000. this lovingly packaged lp is no exception, being a classic example of his hushed beauty infused creaking alien sounds, though no description will ever do it justice!" - Rough Trade

"After a slew of CDRs and cassettes, Alitaju Ylimina is the first vinyl release by Jani Hirvonen, one of the most active members of what seems to be an insanely active Finnish underground including kindred spirits Lau Nau, Kuupuu, Islaja, and Kemialliset Ystävät, to name but a few. Not surprisingly Hirvonen has already hooked up with similar adventurers in the free psychedelic / trance / experimental scene elsewhere, collaborating with the likes of Anla Courtis, Peter Wright and Phil Todd. Musically, it's hard to pinpoint; "glorious lo-fi", says the Dekorder website, and that's a rather good description - we're not talking scuzzy lo-fi Arthur Doyle-at-home-with-his-Walkman or some of the vintage Saturns that sound as if they were recorded inside a shoebox - lo-fi this might be but it's not at all lacking in definition and depth. There's a freshness to it all, a commendably unpretentious love of sound in all its forms, a willingness to explore the worlds of drone, soft noise and free folk as a tourist rather than a paid-up subscriber just following the house rules. For when those rules come to be written - and it will eventually happen in this scene just as it has with free jazz, improv and field recording-based sound art - the muscles will atrophy, the music will become formulaic and clean, and people like Hirvonen will probably end up playing at ATP or something equally terrifying. Until that day comes, enjoy your freedom. If anybody in particular springs to mind on listening to this, it's Angus MacLise (maybe those strange snaking flute improvisations and percussion freakouts towards the end of the "Atopia" side), one of the few who chose to quit the corporate game rather than play along. So maybe it's no surprise to learn that Hirvonen, like MacLise before him, has gone off to the Indian subcontinent. I look forward to hearing what he brings back."- DW / Paris Transatlantic

"First ever vinyl album from this mysterious European psychedelic communal drone/action unit in an edition of 500 copies with fold-out art sleeves featuring art by Uton on the outside and art from Dutch artist Christelle Gualdi on the inner. The actual sonics shift from almost MEV-scale electro-acoustic destruction into doomy halflights of subliminal melody caught up in vortices of metal and teeth." - Volcanic Tongue

"The German Dekorder label has a very nice habit of releasing excellent stuff on vinyl. Finnish Uton's Alitaju Ylimina is no exception. If you've been a fan of Uton's (AKA Jani Hirvonen) previous outings on labels such as Jewelled Antler, Pseudo Arcana, Last Visible Dog, Digitalis and Ikuisuus it goes without saying that these electro-acoustic sound collages and noise-clad drones will feel right at home in your record collection. Droning strings wrestle with lo-fi electronics, minimal guitar scratchings, shamanic folk structures and distant traces of jazz ideas, and although definitely remaining on the difficult side of fringe music, this multi-faceted piece of beautiful vinyl still works like balsam for the warped mind." - Broken Face

"I could have used the same intro here, that I wrote for the Black To Comm / Aosuke -split album (http://www.monochrom.at/cracked/reviews/Rev%20blacktocomm4.htm) also on Dekorder, but one always comes first as long as we live in a dimension that is dominated by time. But without time there would be no music, so let's be glad that we are able to not only percieve the fourth dimension but to also grace it and adorn it with sounds and their managed evolution. Hah, calling music the "managed evolution of sound in realtime" is way too over the top for me, actually, but then Uton is also not easy to get a grip on. So, please read that mentioned intro first and then come back here to read about Uton.

Jani Hirvonen is a long standing, well known avantgarde / underground musician / experimenter from Finland. You can see right away from the slashes being used in this description that allow for at least four different variations that it is not easy to measure him up. "alitaju ylimina" contains all kinds of weird drones, noise outbursts, ecstasy and mysticism, psychedelia and free jazz, multi instrumentalism and manipulation of sounds and a lot more. Can you imagine what this guy's extended discography sounds like? He has released dozens of CDs, CDRs and tapes and has collaborated with anybody that found his way into the woods where this ghost resides.

A certain kind of inner spirituality seems to play an important role in Uton's music. Not only because of the, probably mostly cliché, reclusiveness of the Finnish and the therefore attributed closeness to nature and the endless and dangerous wilderness of the Finnish outlands, but also because his songs tend to turn into manic chants and magic disruptions. Crying vocals of shamanic loops with fitting percussion feeding itself into a frenzy and crashing percussions mixed with echoing noises and deep sounds that reverb through what might be time and space - didn't we mention time as being really important in the beginning? - and far away in both.

The colourful and intriguing cover gives away a sort of earth spirit sentiment, with a goldike creature towering above a stylized earth globe, blowing flames downwards to the surface and loosening the widely spun connections between earth and the heavens. (the foldout cover is shown above turned sideways - just drop your head to the right and you can get a glimpse of all its glory.) This is contrasted by a wild, energetic black and white drawings that are somewhere between traditional Japanese paintings and a psychotic drug attack. To me it looks like nightly paintings of a nightmare that played in a wood, with nothing much more in memory but the fierceness of the trees.
What exactly makes up the magic and the fascination with this record is hard to say. Everything seems to change all the time and as soon as you think you have found our way through a certain song or track, it changes again. Or maybe it is a completely new song? There is also no help through this dark wood of sound connotations and mystic noises, other than what is already inside you. And according to some mystic wisdom of nature, there is nothing that is not inside you. Now use the puzzlement that lies within this paradox logic to step forward into the breach that opens between these sentiments. Hirvonen nevertheless will always be several steps ahead of you. It seems evident that he has either created his own mystic universe or that he is an experienced explorer of the psychedelic universe.

One thing is for sure though, there is not a lot on this planet that is even closely comparable to the unique wisdom and vision of Uton." - Monochrom

"For every band that manages a record every few months, there are bands who we like just as much, but who we don't hear from nearly enough. Such is the case with Finnish combo Uton. In the space of time it takes for us to get a new record from these guys, a band like Circle spit out 2 or 3 (even more if you count side projects). But with Uton it's well worth the wait.
Alitaju is another epic expanse of mysterious murk and long form ambience. A dizzying mix of Finnish free folk, and haunting dark ambience. Uton's sound is always both massive and cavernous, as well as intimate and highly detailed. This record is no different. Uton drags us along on a strange and wondrous journey through long muddy swirls of muted melody and wide open stretches of indistinct blur and shadow, almost festive percussion jams draped over wheezing accordions and distorted feedback, all wrapped in foggy swirls of fuzz, chaotic free jazz freakouts with mad drumming, and wildly fluttering flutes, and all stops in between.
The long tracks here tend to be slow moving glacial crawls, with all the instruments smeared into one blurry whole, a drifting stretch of warm muted soft sound, that just sort of envelops you with it's haunting mystery and dense creeping beauty, those tracks separated by the more rhythmic passages, almost like a rise in the road,where the fog clears and you can see for miles into the distance, before you dip back down under cover of the grey clouds and billowing fog. As always, gorgeous and mysterious." - Aquarius Records