Panic (2007): Three Circle Albums in One, Under Fake Names

Three Records in One

Album cover — rights belong to the original label

Panic is one of the clearest examples of the band's habit of building a single record out of pieces that shouldn't belong together. Its 45 minutes are split into three distinct sections: a run of synth-ambient pieces, then a run of short punk songs, then a closing section that fades through a near-silent track into a 15-minute drone piece, "And Far Away."

The band recorded it under a set of in-joke pseudonyms — Jussi Lehtisalo as "Junttura," Janne Westerlund as "Sikiö," Tomi Leppänen as "Mätky," and Mika Rättö as "Klinga Präpierde" — the same fake names that resurfaced four years later on the 2011 EP Mylläri. The CD's own sticker billed the band as "Finland Speed-Kraut Pioneers," a tag that's as much a joke as the band's self-coined NWOFHM label.

Panic sits close in the catalog to Miljard (2006), and together the two records make the case that by the mid-2000s, Circle was as interested in structure and concept as in any one genre — punk, drone, and ambient sitting on the same record, under fake names, on purpose.

The Full Running Order

The 45:40 album breaks cleanly into the three movements fans already talk about: three longer synth pieces up front, six blink-and-they're-gone punk blasts in the middle (none topping 1:45), and a closing pair — an 11:49 hushed piece bleeding into the 14-minute drone closer, a hair under the "fifteen minutes" the track gets rounded to in shorthand. Ektro's own catalog copy frames the record as the band studying both ends of a previously-unheard static-to-hyperactive scale, and The Quietus's overview of the catalog draws the same line from outside, describing Circle's run "from minimalism (Miljard, 2006) to punk (Panic, 2007)" as consecutive, deliberate genre swings rather than a gradual drift.

The cover art fits the mood swing — it depicts war and street rioting, an image period sales copy tied explicitly to "the history and the current state of Western civilization." Panic has had at least one vinyl life after its original CD release, reissued on black vinyl under Ektro's Full Contact Records imprint. No documentation found anywhere — Discogs, Ektro, or period press — explains what the pseudonyms themselves reference; if that's out there, it isn't indexed, so this page doesn't guess at it.

The Complete Tracklist

Individual song titles rarely come up in writing about Panic, since most coverage talks about the record in terms of its three-part structure rather than track by track. For the record: the synth-ambient opener runs "Black Tape" (5:41) into "State Powder" (3:41) and "Pigs in the Paper" (3:29). The punk run packs six songs into just over five minutes combined — "Neverending Dinner" (0:38), "Good Day Rising" (0:59), "Feed My Rabbit" (1:03), "U.M.F.G. Horsemen" (1:25), "We Must Breathe" (1:44), and "Misheritage" (1:09) — before the closing pair, "Tunnel" (11:49) and "And Far Away" (14:04), together outlast the other nine tracks combined. On Discogs, the album currently averages 4.02 out of 5 across 46 collector ratings — solidly positive, if a step below the more uniformly-praised Andexelt/Prospekt/Taantumus run, which tracks with Panic's reputation as one of the catalog's more polarizing records precisely because of that three-way genre split.