Peter Shapiro in The Wire, January 2001:

"If any A&R men are paying attention, my bet for the next Seattle or Madchester or Cologne is Finland. The country's got all the ingredients: a small population with slightly unhinged sensibilities who spend the better part of the year in the dark bored to tears drinking copious amounts of alcohol. If that also sounds like Aberdeen, then consider the Finns' outward looking nature, a rapidly liberalising culture, the loot to be extracted from both a functioning social democracy and the country's telecom boom, and a plentiful supply of good, cheap secondhand records and you've got the makings of, if not a revolution, then at least a future Eurovision dynasty.
However, as the Avanto Festival (the country's first avant electronics shindig) and Kimmo Pohjonen's Kalmuk Symphony showed, Finland is already producing music worthy of attention. Accordionist Pohjonen is surely one of the world's most idiosyncratic musicians (...)
At the Avanto Festival later that same evening at the Gloria club, the attention to detail was no less significant: they were handing out earplugs at the door - Merzbow was playing. First up, though, was Kaffe Matthews, who set up off the stage, in the centre of the audience area, in pitch black aside from her work lamp. From the balcony it was like peering in on the artist in her atelier. Matthews was surrounded by a couple of hundred people sitting crosslegged and rapt as she moved from enveloping low end drones to piercing electronics to the death march of an Insectoid army to car skids and train whistles. Local boys Strom.ec followed with engaging but not terribly special miked-oildrum squelchscapes. Then it was one man and his Powerbook against the world. With gaze fixed and serene Zen posture, Merzbow sat perfectly still, unwavering as the world (and a hyperactive dry ice machine) burned around him - I don't think he even blinked. As Merzbow ran through the entire frequency range from 15-60Hz, a Death Metal exile in a leather duster with cut-off sleeves and spiked leather bracelets smiled the smile of the damned while lasting the entire set without earplugs. Despite the occasional bass throbs that conjured up the ghost of Frankie Bones past, the guy who danced through the first half eventually realised it was a lost cause.
The festival also featured an excellent film programme curated by Mika Taanila. Highlights included Ian Helliwell's Crystallization, a fantasia of intense pulsating colour and dancing droplets made by applying bleach and ink to Super 8, and Herwig Weiser's Entrée, kind of like Abraham Zapruder filming power plants before breaking into geometrical abstraction with a score by FX Randomiz and Jan St Werner. In the same theatre inside the stunning Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Scanner played a fine set of crackles, washes, the odd string sample, some theremin whining and some deconstructed beats. There was close-up footage of his hands at work with what looked like a bank of credit card verifying machines. One really chattering number, in which he tapped out the beat on a numbered keypad, was like the sound of number crunching -a bureaucrat's worst nightmare.
Many sane peoples' worst nightmare is Helsinki's own Op:l Bastards, who played a set of bass whorls and hurricane static to bizarre videos of action figures made out of ginger root. One 'song' had a bass line like Michael Myers gaining on you with steadily building clicks, like a Chain Reaction record on coke; another was like Gil Melle directing the cantina band from Star Wars; while Scanner described another as 'twisted Alpine marching music'. The Bastards were followed on stage by the much more spartan trio of Christian Fennesz, Peter Rehberg and Mika Vainio. Although Vainio was looking rather rakish in a magenta bowling shirt and grey taxi driver's cap, with the backlit stage and the three stern men staring into their machines, it was like you were in the Star Chamber waiting to be judged. And the music was definitely a test of your will grinding power, Psycho-style electronic stabs, dubby passages with blistering glitches. Local act Ovuca moved from pleasant textural Techno to state of the art 'Ardkore and had the kids dancing. Finishing things off, Pan Sonic's llpo Väisänen performed a set of preposterous white noise DJing (was that a Full Watts record he was thrashing to death?) - maybe nothing to worry Q-Bert, but pretty enjoyable nevertheless.
The following evening, Pan Sonic played an excellent gig (even if the volume was so low that Peter Rehberg fell asleep) at the Kiasma Teatteri. Väisänen was working his toys like a Kingston DJ throwing sound effects through the dance, while Vainio sat staring at his machines like a physics professor concerned that the experiment had gone wrong. Heartbeat bass was undercut by waves of razors, lawnmowers, cropdusters and a bee caught in a glass. A game of conkers later broke out on the percussion, while 'Mentasm' and 'Jupiter Jazz', as DJed by Freddie Kruger, hovered in the background later, at the festival's after-party in a beatnik beer keller in the Academy of the Arts, a DJ played Finnish rock dinosaurs Hurriganes, a Finnish version of 'Kung Fu Fighting' and Euro-disco's evil twin in the form of some guy intoning, 'disco, disco, disco, I must lighten up'. The Pink Twins followed with a nice mini-set of decomposing electronics, and Fennesz played his 'Beach Boys' set of oceanic electronica which made someone sporting a fabulous beard start crocheting. And if that's not a ringing endorsement of the Finnish music scene, I don't know what is."