Beneath the barcode and contact info on the back insert of Ovuca's Lactavent is the statement, "Home taping is killing music and it's illegal!" Flying Saucer Attack apparently disagree completely with that statement-- on the spine of their 1995 release, Further, are the words, "Home taping is reinventing music." (Make of it what you will, but that's an eerie coincidence.) Luckily, it looks like Ovuca himself, Aleksi Perälä, is just being plain silly. Or is he?

That's the problem with a lot of Aphex Twin's Rephlex- issued material. The artists on the British label's roster seem to take their goofing around pretty damn seriously. Which is fine, but it can be hard to tell the difference between their true sonic experiments and their tongue- in- cheek castoffs.

Perälä's not as guilty of this as some of his contemporaries, though-- he actually manages to make it work on a regular basis. The first actual song on the disc, the hyperactive "Vutsaa," sounds like Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll Pt. 2" twisted into an early 90's techno anthem sans a driving dance beat. To any right- minded individual, that probably sounds like a disaster. But repeated listens show a song with twice the energy of anything Fatboy Slim has ever done, and with 1/4 the instrumentation.

Perälä's sound varies quite a bit over the course of these 22 tracks (and just under 40 minutes), but that's probably due to the fact that these songs were recorded over a length of eight years (1990-1998). First he's inventing sounds Autechre would mimic years later, then he's pulling out some bizarre late 80's minimalist industrial music (one of the album's highlights, "Leiba"), then he's sculpting jerky, hi-strung drill-n-bass out of tinny samples of metal on metal ("Auinko"), and then he's beating Moby at his own ethereal ambient game ("Festival"). So, yeah, it's diverse, but it's maybe not as cohesive as it could be. On the other hand, the songs are all about two minutes long, which makes it perfect for people with short attention spans. (That's you and you know it.)

Ovuca tends to pepper his tracks with buzzing distortion, adding a seriously lo-fi feel to the music, but it's an obvious ploy to make the music sound more sarcastic and "edgy." Sometimes it works, other times it just seems excessive. Lactavent also sees Perälä occasionally slip into rabid Nintendo territory, which fits nicely amidst the other sounds of aggressive machinery-- he realizes the 8-bit sound's limitations, and reins it in for the better part of the album. (If Nintendo is what you want, though, you might check out Ovuca labelmates Bodenstandig 2000.) So, whatever it means to you, this is a guy who's not afraid to make dot matrix printers sing together. And in a time where things of that nature are generally looked down upon as relatively "uncool," I think it's pretty commendable that he had the balls and talent to pull it off.

-Ryan Schreiber