In 1994, on an album known as Minimal Nation, Detroit’s Robert Hood stripped Motor Metropolis funk to its bones. Most of its tracks had been made from little greater than lithe, swinging drum programming and solitary synth patches that glistened like oil slicks; it’s typically thought-about the origin level for what got here to be often called minimal techno. In February of the identical 12 months, greater than 4,000 miles away, a taciturn younger Finn named Mika Vainio took an excellent sharper scalpel to the identical concepts. His debut album, Metri, couldn’t be extra skeletal if it had been a laboratory specimen. The place there are drum machines, they merely thump and hiss; his custom-built tone mills glisten like icicles and roar like buzz bombs. If Hood’s album represented minimal techno’s floor zero, Vainio’s was its floor Ø.
Vainio would go on to change into greatest often called one half of Pan Sonic, a duo (with Ilpo Väisänen) that, from the early Nineties till its dissolution in 2009, waged a scorched-earth marketing campaign towards digital music’s staid conventions. Nevertheless it was Vainio’s Ø alias—after a logo signifying absence in a lot of contexts, from math and geometry to linguistics—that might be his longest-running challenge, evolving from these brutalist techno origins to embody a big selection of digital strategies and soundscapes.
Along with many solo and collaborative albums beneath his personal identify, Vainio launched eight albums as Ø till 2017, when he plunged from a cliff in France. He had been at work on a ninth Ø album for 3 years on the time of his dying. Working from notes he left behind, Tommi Grönlund, his good friend and founding father of the Sähkö label, and Rikke Lundgreen, Vainio’s former associate, compiled the fabric into Sysivalo, his remaining album. (In accordance with Lundgreen, Vainio had already determined upon the album idea, title, monitor order, and even cowl artwork.) The title—a portmanteau which means one thing like “charcoal gentle”—is evocative and becoming. Vainio’s music usually felt like an apocalyptic conflict between being and nothingness, however on Sysivalo, darkness and light-weight stream collectively in methods which are uncommon for his work, evoking a dynamic combination of vulnerability, tenderness, and style.
Vainio’s music might typically sound like he had jacked instantly into {an electrical} substation, however his palette right here is tender and tufted. Distant thunder takes on a purplish pastel hue, misted with white noise. There are few exhausting assaults and even fewer moments the place the degrees bleed crimson. A bite-sized high quality distinguishes these 20 tracks, which run shorter than he sometimes labored. Vainio’s enduring curiosity in capturing the vastness of sound is distilled into items that really feel each atmospheric and tactile, like cupping small clouds of coloured smoke in your arms. But there’s little doubt that Sysivalo is envisioned as an album—a single, overarching work, quite than a set of stray items. A ruminative temper pervades the hour, and tones and themes regularly repeat. The drawn-out foghorn blast that opens the album with “Etude 1” reappears, whittled to a positive level, in “Etude 5,” and turns up once more 9 tracks later in “Aine” (“substance”), threading the album with a faint sense of deja vu.
