 I didn't think I'd hear a scarier record than Kreng's L'autopsie Phénoménale De Dieu in 2009. But then came Mika Vainio's Black Telephone of Matter. Kreng sounds positively sweet by comparison. Vainio's tailored noise is deeply fissured, unforgivingly ambiguous, and almost entirely devoid of the kind of cues that help us read sound as music. He doesn't mix in any creepy strings or detuned pianos to humanize his compositions, and he locates more feeling in near-silence than high volume, which makes him distinct from harsh-noise mavens. Only a few sounds on the album-- some mangled bird calls, a scattering of cymbals, hints of deconstructed death-metal on "Swedenborgia"-- are mimetic. All else is seething, oozing. It's a pitch-black world where blown-out machines mutter to each other.
As a member of Pan Sonic, a Finnish group that mines a ragged seam between minimal techno, industrial, and power electronics, Vainio (now based in Berlin) is no stranger to dire, confrontational music. Pan Sonic is known for blurring the line between the sonic and the physical. In 1995, they performed in a car park in London with a sound system rigged up on an armored car (designed by the KLF's Jimmy Cauty), similar to what riot squads use, in pursuit of the infamous brown note. One pre-Pan Sonic performance by Vainio found him locked in a room for ten hours with a low-frequency drone at 125 decibels. He's a process-guy with a bottomless fascination for how sound interacts with the whole body, not just the ears and mind....full text |
| Few musicians explore the fine gradations separating signal from noise with the same ferocity and precision as Finland’s Mika Vainio. Over the years, this pursuit has taken a variety of musical forms. He’s best known for the shattering electro-noise he unleashes as one-half of Pan Sonic, but he is also responsible (as Ø and Philus) for creating some of minimal techno’s high-water marks. It is on the far more abstractly structured releases under his own name, however, that Vainio is at his most uncompromising and unsettling. And that’s saying something. Black Telephone of Matter, Vainio’s fourth solo album for the Touch imprint, is as unflinchingly extreme as ever. As often as not, it doesn’t pummel you with relentless waves of noise, but rather forces you to strain your ears to capture the finer points of each and every hiss and hum. Paradoxically, these barely audible elements, such as the delicate radio-static sizzle that opens the album with "Roma A.D. 2727," provide just as visceral a thrill as the sharp bursts of white noise and gut-rumbling thrums of sub-bass. Each of the pieces on Black Telephone of Matter consists of series of loosely structured, atmospheric episodes. The sounds may be those of pure, machine-age dystopia, but the structures themselves are more elemental, evoking the capriciousness of coastal weather patterns. One of the album’s centerpieces, "Silencés Traverses Des Mondes Et Des Anges," is the most literal example of this. The track begins with an ominous cawing of crows, followed by the distant rumble of thunder and soft, pitter-pat of falling rain. The sounds drift and melt into static before a crescendo, and – very suddenly – falling away. After a thunderous silence, a taut, rhythmic 4/4 pattern emerges (one of the few bones thrown to fans of Pan Sonic’s lockstep beats) that then gives way to a single, razor-edged sine tone. And so it goes. At times, it’s blazingly loud, at others you strain to pick out the tiny, mercurial droplets of sound. Like the album as a whole, it’s ominous and terrifying, but also quite extraordinarily subtle and austerely beautiful. Given the abiding pleasures to be found in the littlest details, this is one of those records that really does reward a bit of attentive listening. And though every so often a passage will rear up and scare the bejesus out of you, so much the better....full text |
(September 2009) Probably best known as half of electronic experimentalists Pan Sonic, Mika Vainio also records under his own name as well as Philus and Ø. This album, his fourth solo album since 1997 for the UK’s esteemed Touch label, sees him further explore the minimal side of his electronic palette.
Covering seven tracks in just less than 55 minutes, Black Telephone of Matter appears to be compiled from a series of short experiments with different sound techniques and then fused into a collection of tracks. Often abruptly switching between completely different yet related sounds, Vainio contrasts abstract digital fragments with field recordings of rain, birds or running water. The mood sways between stark, clinical precision and dark creeping tension. "Silencés Traverses Des Mondes et Des Anges" for example builds from the outset with a slow paced thud before erupting into distorted layers of oscillating electronic noise that form an uneasy nightmarish atmosphere almost as though coming from some shadow dimension. Continuing with a deep oscillating bassy tone and a period of silence, the track slowly starts to re-emerge with the ebb of barely audible undulating tones and insectoid squeaks hinting at horrors unseen. Moving into "Bury a Horse’s Head" the minimal theme continues but begins to evolve and become more pronounced. Stop start buzzes of distorted hazy static fade away to reveal a low electrical hum that mutates briefly into a metallic screech and futuristic whir. Not content with just that a further transition introduces a low oscillating bass tone that changes tone to become an aggressive Tesla coil throb....full text |
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