"Tampere, Finland has become quite the musical hotbed over the past few years. Staples like Avarus and Kemialliset Ystävät make their beds in the gnome-infested waters throughout the city. Uton is perhaps the country's best kept secret. Mystery Revolution is a sonic excursion through the Finnish forests unlike any other. Massive drones are balanced by the hypnotic dance of flutes, bells, and keyboards. Underneath everything runs a mind-altering stream of fuzzed-out brainwaves. Every corner you turn, there's another smiling nymph, begging you to follow the golden path into the mystic woods. Uton's minimalist rumblings are there to infect and enchant, and Hirvonen never fails to impress. The mask is off with Mystery Revolution, and Uton will remain shrouded in obscurity no more. This pine-scented excursion may be mysterious on the surface, but overall is a thing of beauty, lying in wait for the perfect time to infect you. Mystery Revolution is proof that Uton's dreamy soundscapes are one of Finland's finest exports." - Digitalis

"I realise I spend a lot of time banging on about Finland, droney improvisational hippy music, distorted tape sounds and experimental warbling and clattering, so imagine my joy when a disc arrived which ticked all of these boxes within the first 5 minutes. Coming across like a faint signal of life from far away planets, Uton is best aligned with the subtle noodlings of Jewelled Antler lynchpins Thuja, with distorted analogue synthesizers, bowed guitars and unnamed small instruments blended together to form a sort of audio fog. This is how minimal music should sound, it's not minimal to the point of forcing you to try and hear if there's anything happening at all, it's merely quiet and underplayed and it is painstakingly woven together with an incredible display of skill and restraint. More interestingly though, there's a huge chunk of Radiophonic Workshop/Early Electronic style experimentation on offer here, more in line with something you'd hear on the hallowed Ohm boxset than maybe on your latest collection of 'free folk'. We have heard this angle explored by Kemialliset Ystävät in his Fonal emissions, yet Uton takes things one step further and succeed on all counts. There are even moments on 'Mystery Revolution' that wouldn't be out of place accompanying Cybermen as they escape an icy tomb... Probably my favourite release on the crucial Digitalis label, Uton has forged a timeless addition to the mysterious Finnish avant garde." - Boomkat

"At first I thought the cloud of popping and cracking sound that Uton opens this album with was going to resolve into a soft commotion of rhythm and melody. "Aikavirta" suggests crescendo and prologue, the slow accumulation of tension that makes every release such a wonderful feeling. I waited and waited somewhere until I realized that what I was hearing composed the whole of the album. I like abstract music a lot, but the best abstract has to offer always makes some reference to form and structure. Even the most nebulous albums ranked among my favorites feel as though they're traveling somewhere. If not, they're sustaining some sound, thought, or feeling that warrants such stasis. Mystery Revolution, on the other hand, begins adrift and ends adrift, without much in the middle to suggest a journey ever occurred. Flutes, whistles, bells, chimes, analogue bellows, and all manner of fascinating source material manages never to come together for Uton. Whatever mystery his foggy music hides stays that way until they very end, negating and reflecting any light that even comes close to it. Strings buzz and shift restlessly on "Taivaan Sini Sokea (Soikea)," but never do more than that. They don't necessarily match very well with the other sounds on the song, they do not add to whatever sensation the song inspires (in my case, I feel almost nothing listening to this record), and they certainly don't seem to be arranged very well, becoming lost in the rest of the music. Everything seems to be arranged without forethought or plan. Improvised music has its place and there are plenty of people who will swear by the possibilities it presents to the musicians and the audience when it is performed, but in this particular case all I get out of listening to this record is a little bit of frustration. Uton has a knack for picking out some interesting noise, but his talent for arrangement is his Achilles' heel." - Lucas Schleicher / Brainwashed

"Like Avarus and Kemialliset Ystävät, Uton, or to put a name to the noise - Jani Hirvonen - hails from the improvisational wellspring of Tampere, Finland. But unlike the extroverted communal strum and clatter of those outfits, the Uton trades in dark ambience and virtual formlessness. Uton makes music that sounds like decaying echoes: sounds left behind when others have switched off their electronics and packed up their acoustics and called it quits for the night. As the sleeve for 'Mystery Revolution' puts it: "inside the dreams, behind and beyond". 'Mystery Revolution' contains nine relatively short pieces that track like alien shortwave. Together they form the kind of work that somewhat lazily gets classified as "forest music". I'd say not, personally. Tracks are formed of icy drones, unidentifiable sounds from an occluded palette of acoustic instrumentation, and informed by a refusal to coalesce into rhythmic structures. This music, with its pervading sense of urban alienation, seems to connect more to the industrial and isolationist. Its beauty is in assembly and flow, and tracks seamlessly transition from one to the next, like the scene transitions that make perfect sense in dreams but are seen to be, on awakening, surreal. Good to see Digitalis continuing their mission to bring the wilfully obscure from the CD-R underground to more generally available production CDs. 'Highway Nation' finds Uton on the more typical CD-R format, with five tracks that present some of the project's most minimalist work (which is saying something). Compared to 'Mystery Revolution' tracks are longer, with more drones and less in the way of bells, flutes and stringed instruments. These are compositions to upload into the computers of deep space probes to use as beacon transmissions. Tracks are untitled, furthering their claim to anonymity. Nothing much other than steady-state drone is on the menu here, with slight shifts in frequency differentiating tracks. There are common points of reference with some of the minimalist work in the mid-period of Coil's catalogue, but this is more dreamlike, meditative and obscure. Like most works of true minimalism, 'Highway Nation' is best heard at high volume levels in a reverberant space, allowing the sounds to bounce of everything, reinforcing or cancelling themselves at intersection points, and creating entirely new works depending on the variables of playback equipment, environment and mind-set. - Tony Dale / Terrascope (reviewed with Highway Nation CDR album)

"The music by one-man band Uton is like a mirage; just when you think you've got your hands on it, it turns immaterial and melts away. Jani Hirvonen, who comes from from Tampere, Finland, deploys sounds with extraordinary care. Random-sounding percussion, droning keyboards, hesitantly plucked strings, and echo-bathed flutes drift in and out of the mix like ghosts moving on and off the stage of some eldritch pageant set in a crumbling factory at the edge of an old-growth forest. "Naurumme Hetken (Seuranna Otto)" would be a fitting soundtrack for some spook house; the keys hover for a time and then wind down while chimes clank and toll, blinking in and out like glimpses of some distant torch procession. "Taivaan Sini Sokea (Soikea)" is even more eerie; guitar licks slither and writhe like tentacles, grasping after the wordless singer who sounds like he might be trying to crawl out of the track on all fours. "Kuun Käsi Kävelee" plays up the music's mechanistic elements; while flutes call forlornly from the next hill, synth bursts start and stop like a truck whose engine won't quite turn over. The following track "Unohdettu Välipala" leads with an asthmatic squeezebox, but monster-movie organs overtake it like little green men engulfing a space age Gulliver with tangled cables of twisted melody. Hirvonen makes especially apposite use of shortwave radio on "Psykosoaattinen Luuranko"; its distorted voices and crumbling static ooze around a music-box tune like some malevolent fog covering the advance of just-landed aliens. But as nifty as Uton's music sounds, each piece recedes from memory as soon it ends, like a spell whose power only lasts while it's being recited." - Bill Meyer / Dusted