Compilations of a genre of music provide listeners with a cross-section of a musical community, a means of entry into a particular artistic domain populated with diverse individuals and approaches connected by aesthetic or social context. The electroacoustic community has been fortunate in the past decade to have had many such "keys" to the activities of those involved in electroacoustic music-making made readily available. One can cite as examples compilations from the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC), Society for Electro-Acoustic Music of the United States (SEAMUS), Consortium for the Distribution of Computer Music (CDCM), and empreintes DIGITALes, among others. SOUNDS! gives us yet another opportunity to sample the explorations of a group of engaged and dedicated practitioners of sonic art.

This compilation, conceived, produced, and curated by Finnish composer Petri Kuljuntausta offers the listener twenty three-minute electroacoustic works in as many different styles employing contemporary digital instrumentation. Electronic ambient soundscapes are represented by Jukka Ruohomäki's Jockey Seq, noise collage in Hermosolu by Vesa Lahti and in Kidstone Doing by Timo Hietala and Juhani Liimatainen (ending with a wonderful exploration of granulated children's voices in combination with a simple piano melody and the rhythmic commentary of a kalimba mbira), electronic free-jazz in Pipana by Jarmo Sermilä, and the moody, volatile acousmatic essay in Radial Nerve Pressure, by Patrick Kosk, with its effectively sculpted masses of sound and well-calculated dynamic shifts. Valve-üni by Ami Hassinen, Jyrki Kastman, and Antti Hassinen represents the ever-popular, trance-like, perpetuum mobile meditation, while Im Vorgeigehen by Juhani Nuorvala provides a striking and abrasive contrast complete with drums and bongos underscoring a cacophonous barrage of sampled voice and clanging metal. Ms. Kuljuntausta contributes two works to the collection, Idea of Proof and The Waiting Room. Both of these compositions are successful explorations of granulated and time-scaled voice materials. She controls the overall design of these pieces admirably by combining voice materials of varying degrees of intelligibility with more extreme textural transformations.

Other notable works on SOUNDS! include Jukka Ylitalo's intense and unyeilding Hacking the Sky, Ines Reingold's colorful and flamboyant Suction, and the soundscape compositions of Jukka Mikkola and Tom Ahola in Microseasonings and Deep Sea Tribe, respectively.