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Until the day when Jay Lesser is recognized as the genius of sonic terrorism that he really is, there's V/VM. Now only down to one member (as Janski Noise has permanently joined forces with DJ Speedranch), V/VM mixes junk store gems (e.g. Donald Duck's sputtering quacks, tabernacle choirs, marching bands, MSR style renditions of Elvis songs, crappy star-search pop songs, etc...) with the awesome power of the Chaos Pad and an array of distorted breakbeats.
Right from the get-go, the V/VM compilation "Hate You" is easily the most enjoyable (read: not annoying or irritatingly ironic) and well executed collection from this Stockport collective. The basic premise here is, well, pretty much the same as any other V/VM project: take any "shite" track and slice, dice, shred, add tons of distortion and completely destroy the shit out of it.
V/VM -- a label, a band, a concept, and perhaps most importantly a mistake -- has now stooped to taking potshots at The Aphex Twin, who has been very quiet for the past three years, releasing just the "Windowlicker" ep in 1999. While the silence of Aphex
We don't either...still, here's vol. one of infamous UK electronic jokesters V/VM's unoffical/unneccesary Aphex Twin "remix" project.
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V/VM's prankster electronica furrows its brow for "Masters Of The Absurd" -- a far more seriously minded vinyl-only release of digital crunch and mind-erasing distortion than is ususal for these guys, who are normally so worthy of the album's title. Yes, absurdity has always had a place within the work of this Manchester duo; but here, their anarchic glee in atomizing sound information has released a malevolent alter-ego who has little patience for the silliness of their earlier work crafted from digitally damaged thrift store vinyl. V/VM's grand absurdist gesture on "Masters Of The Absurd" is the assignment of a pig farmer and a butcher as the protagonists in their electronica drama. Beyond that, there isn't much logic to V/VM's assaults: just thick layers of overloaded digital noise, decomposing tonal drone haze, stolen fanfares of bombastic almost Wagnerian scores, and an obliteration of George Michael's "Careless Whisper" for those wanting a smattering of V/VM giddiness. Willfully difficult data jamming and blistering electro-shock treatment!
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Oh no. V/VM has too much time on their hands. "Sick-Love" is a collection of their warbled hard disc edit / hack jobs that butcher top 40 love ballads from The Spice Girls, Simply Red, Lionel Ritchie, Berlin, etc... This record is a really bad joke that goes on too long...which maybe puts it into the good joke category. Wait a minute, shouldn't V/VM and Neil Hambuger get together for an all star comedy album?
While V/VM has recently been responsible for some of the worst and most unlistenable mash-ups of UK pop hits into ring-modulated pisstakes, this twin set "Sometimes, Good Things Happen" steps away from their recent atrocities. But it's still hard to trust that V/VM has constructed these recordings with any degree of sincerity; rather, I would postulate that these albums could be KLF-like jokes attempting to seduce the aloof audiences from the IDM crowd into liking V/VM again, much like the KLF did in their ambient record "Chill Out" in which they derided the early '90s ambient scene as being just music for sheep by making one of the best examples of ambient techno. I have no proof for this assumption, just a hunch and an innate distrust for V/VM. Regardless, V/VM claims that the two parts to "Sometimes, Good Things Happen" are the same, when to any sane individual they are clearly different with a less than solid conceptual connection.
The blue album - being the digitally coarse noise album in the pairing - could be viewed as the negation of all of the beautiful melodies and subtle structures of the first. Yet, this side of the dyptic doesn't entirely work as a noise album full of immediate impact and visceral textures and stands more as an execution of a concept. Allan wondered if it's the same V/VM as before and if there had been some internal personnel shifting within the group. Quite possible.
While V/VM has recently been responsible for some of the worst and most unlistenable mash-ups of UK pop hits into ring-modulated pisstakes, this twin set "Sometimes, Good Things Happen" steps away from their recent atrocities. But it's still hard to trust that V/VM has constructed these recordings with any degree of sincerity; rather, I would postulate that these albums could be KLF-like jokes attempting to seduce the aloof audiences from the IDM crowd into liking V/VM again, much like the KLF did in their ambient record "Chill Out" in which they derided the early '90s ambient scene as being just music for sheep by making one of the best examples of ambient techno. I have no proof for this assumption, just a hunch and an innate distrust for V/VM. Regardless, V/VM claims that the two parts to "Sometimes, Good Things Happen" are the same, when to any sane individual they are clearly different with a less than solid conceptual connection.
If you have to choose one over the other (and that is recommended), pick the Orange disc. This album is a dreamy collection of floating ambient washes, metallic drones, and sensibly minimal rhythmic clicks, not at unlike the acclaimed Aphex Twin album "Selected Ambient Works Vol 2." Surprisingly listenable, but should you trust V/VM to not laugh at you for enjoying this? Of course not. But so what?
V/VM was the first project that forced sonic hermit Leyland Kirby into the public eye, when he emerged as a giddy figurehead for the amphetamine-amped drill'n'bass that blossomed around the likes of Hrvatski, Aphex Twin, and Atari Teenage Riot in the late '90s. For all of the hype that surrounded him, Kirby's 'sound' was essentially, a purposefully aggravating, immature brand of cheap musical humor by turns, brutal, noisy, dumb and occasionally sort of genius, although it mostly tended toward the goofy - which included shameful plunderings of '80s dreck ballads, by running a Chris Deburgh or a Lionel Richie song through a ring modulator. Yeah, much of the V/VM material was ridiculous, puerile, and lots of times borderline unlistenable. But that sort of seemed like the point...
Not surprisingly, we avoided much of the early V/VM stuff, circa '90s and '00s; but those glimpses of genius, would later blossom into the sublime transcendent beauty of Kirby's Caretaker persona, and we were not alone in finding Kirby's work as The Caretaker thoroughly sublime, a stunning haunted ballroom approach to ambient composition through massive amounts of cathedral reverb and ample chorales of surface noise from antiquated '78s.
That said, The Death Of Rave project is perhaps the one body of work from V/VM that should most certainly be heard. And which maybe not surprisingly ran concurrent with some of the earlier explorations as The Caretaker, first being released online as a massive archive of over 200 dancefloor anthems being time-stretched and reworked into rave's anti-apotheosis. No rhythm, no release, no exhilaration, this was all grey sculpted noise and decommissioned electricity. This 'partial flashback' represents the best material from that unwieldy catalog which now seems to have vanished from the internet. (Long live the physical medium!) The Death Of Rave cultivates a slow, almost industrially-minded tension of granular electronic noise, with a sense of fictional memories similar to those created in Kirby's dilated 78 recontextualations as The Caretaker. Here, those would be the fabricated memories sought by Roy Batty and his fellow replicants in Blade Runner, flickering repetitions of pixels into dense networks of cold data that in another context would be a jacked-up acid track or a sensual deep-house groove. But here, it's poetically and poignantly vacant - a residual memory recoded as the empty warehouse itself, where a party once happened, with the floor covered in crushed plastic cups, two-day old vomit-n-beer, broken high-heels, and cigarette butts. And in the maudlin mind of Kirby, that's something quite beautiful.
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V/VM's humor requires that their audience not just be familiar with the artists they appropriate but already be over exposed by their insipid pop songs. It may be a delusional agenda, but V/VM's total destruction of such chart toppers as Elton John, Posh Spice, Lionel Ritchie, etc... is swathed in the righteousness of a dadaist salvation: that the world will be much better off if every pop hit has its obliterated V/VM twin. On paper, that sounds like a great idea; but the realization on a Fisher Price turntable and a Kaoss Pad is less than ideal. But it is funny...sort of.
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Second archival release (the first one sold out before we could get enough to list) from this legendary underground New Zealand rock combo, whose name is most likely familiar to only the most NZ obsessed, but a list of the bands whose members got their start in Vacuum, should definitely get your attention: Pin Group, Terminals, Scorched Earth Policy, Bilders, etc. This was WAY pre-Flying Nun, these tracks culled from late seventies cassettes, but it's easy to hear the sound that would eventually help define a sound that we (and much of the rest of the world) would grow to love. The Christchurch sound started here, and it sounds as good now as it ever did, especially considering how many current bands, whether knowingly or not, continue to borrow and steal from the early NZ days.
The first track "Walking Slow" is a scorcher, murky and lo-fi but somehow still jangly and lush, a droned out jangle pop that manages to take the sounds of the Velvets and make it their own, super catchy, but also sort of cyclical and mesmerizingly repetitive, an early instance of the 'hypnorock' we love so much. "Born & Bled" is even murkier, with drums that sound more like a janky drum machined, the riffage definitely looped sounding, the vox here anguished, the sound more damaged, and way more lo-fi, bordering on experimental, a darkly gloomy pop that definitely foreshadows much of the current crop of gloom poppers.
The flipside is all organ driven drone rock bliss, mumbled vox buried beneath crashing waves of jangle and buzz, churning chords and sixties style drum thump, finishing off with a hooky slab of slithery garage pop stomp rife with crooned vox, the sound blown out, and gloriously distorted.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
"Join the team as they uncover the secret of the three-hundred year old Spanish mummy, solve the riddles of the scary old woman, help Gert-Jan face his fear of water, and try to save the city's pets in an adventure of endless twists and turns, laughs and rock n' roll!"
When I was younger (no seriously, much younger) I liked to read books about kids who started their own detective agencies, Encyclopedia Brown, The Three Investigators, that sort of thing. Indeed I tried to set myself up as a detective too (I had a fingerprint kit and a magnifying glass and even a deerstalker hat) but sadly if unsurprisingly had trouble finding clients with crimes to solve, unlike my fictional counterparts. So I was immediately taken with this new Fire Inc. release, the booklet of which contains Episode Four of "The Secret Of The Haunted Spanish Galleon", a mystery story featuring those precocious kids turned detectives turned rock n' rollers, The Vacuum Boys. Very cleverly presented, with appropriate artwork and graphics. In reality, The Vacuum Boys aren't kids, mystery-solvers, or a rock band. They're Heimir Bjorgulfsson (of Stilluppsteypa), Girt-Jan Prins (MIMEO, solo electronics), Guy Amitai, and Dan Armstrong (Central 87), and deal in electronic clicks and cuts, not clues, and certainly not rock n' roll. Sure there's guitars on here, and drums (Girt IS a real drummer we know, and Dan does guitar and electronics improv), but there's a lot of computer processing involved as well -- and maybe a Hoover. Recorded live at Prins' studio in Rotterdam February 2002, it's a noisy (but pleasantly so), chopped-up glitch-fest of crackle, distortion, whoosh, and bleep, sounding more akin to Merzbow than the Monkees.
Of the current spate of experimental electronic releases, this one is not only pretty great but definitely gets points for being packaged in such an imaginative and thankfully not over-intellectualized way. Go Vacuum Boys! We look forward to their next adventure!
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The tongue twistingly monickered Vacuum Era Gelid Atmosphere, who shell henceforth be referred to as VEGA, has been a huge favorite around these parts, ever since we first laid ears on their Cocaine album.
When we first got that record we were really expecting something fucked up and damaged and bizarre, but instead, Cocaine ended up being one of the fiercest most frenzied and fastest black metal discs we had ever heard, a total soul shearing onslaught so drenched in buzz it seems impossible that the whole thing didn't collapse under the weight of all that buzzing and blasting.
Well here we are revisiting VEGA's past, and guess what, they actually did used to be seriously fucked up and bizarre, their black metal still fierce and frenetic, but tempered by weird eighties style Goblin-y synthscapes and weirdo new wave and all sorts of other whatthefuck-ness.
The opener is appropriately black metal, an intro, but even there, the brooding synths and ominous drones are laced with processed children's voices which are FREAKY. So then, as black metal record law dictates, the next track should be a serious blast of black metal fury, but here, well, it sounds like some eighties John Carpenter soundtrack, or the chase scene in some cheesy sci-fi flick, or Goblin at their new waviest, but fuck it, who cares what the BM bylaws dictate, this stuff is awesome. Haunting and cheesy, dramatic and so over the top, and all over the place, slipping into some ominous synthy drones, before transforming into some minimal almost jungle jam, the skittery beats underneath warm woozy synths and creepy minor key melodies, and finally some harsh black metal vox over the top. And then buzzing guitars. Dropping in with about 50 seconds to go. Fuck yeah. Did we mention we love these guys? Well we love them even more now.
It's not all insane cheesy new wave weirdness, the follow up "Kill Me" explodes in a frenzy of grinding blackness, but even then, part way in, shifts gears and becomes super melodic with soaring melodies, and mathy rhythms, but you know what, by the end, the track has somehow transformed into another synth drenched skittery new wave outro.
And so it goes. Easily half the record is soundtracky new wave-y weirdness. And these guys nail it. Zombi, Proscriptor, you Carpenter / Goblin revisionists better watch your asses, cuz this takes all that stuff and gets it all tangled up with black buzz and blurred blasts. And those are definitely the best moments, when harsh vocals are laid over skittery electronic drums and whirling synths, so wrong it's right!
The band are still capable of spewing black filth with the best of them, "Insex Infect" is a solid 4 minutes of blown out in-the-red black heaviness, putting most BM bands to shame, but then moments later, they offer up a creepy bit of synthy ambience, only to lurch right back into another black frenzy.
The black metal here is top notch, so heavy and brutal and grim, incredible riffs and wild drumming, harsh vokills, and dense tangled arrangements, but the other stuff, it's not just throw away, like most bands tossing in a little keyboard interlude, it's well crafted, dark and mysterious and haunting, ominous and sinister, even without the metal, this would have been an awesome retro chunk of new wave Goblin worship, but with the metal, it's something far more fucked up and GENIUS.
Packaged in one of those oversized super jewel cases. Andee's black metal reissue of the year!!!!
While we are admittedly totally obsessed with damaged and demented, freaky and fucked up, bizarre and obtuse outsider black metal, every once in a while we'll discover a band who manage to incorporate bits of all of those things, but in a way that's much more subtle. A band can be really weird without being totally fucked up. Completely demented without stumbling and struggling and sounding totally damaged. A band can be furious and fast, heavy and complex, brutal and intense, but still be super far out and perplexingly bizarre. Think Spektr, Blut Aus Nord, and now the VEGA Corporation. Or V.E.G.A. Or more specifically, Vacuum Era Gelid Atmosphere. Thanks to AQ pal Drew for turning us on to these guys. We were definitely surprised when we finally heard them. Not at all what you might expect. With a name like Vacuum Era Gelid Atmosphere, and a record called Cocaine. Some trippy abstract very UN-metal artwork and a liner note proclamation that goes like this:
"(V.E.G.A.) supports freedom of thought, sometimes misunderstood as insanity by the most.
The band was born at the last breaths of black metal and dies soon after.
This album is a gift to its memory... a dead-born child... a trip went wrong... a nightmare in your brain...
Feed your insanity...
We now live in the future... as lights, always hiding in the dark, yet shining... as a new band, "VEGA-KORPORATION"
Totally devoted to the exploration of mind, soul and technology..."
We were totally prepared for some stumbling recorded-in-a-cave, howling, midtempo, warbly damaged black buzz. And we would have been totally happy with that for sure. But this band is absolutely nothing like that at all.
V.E.G.A. are impossibly grim and so Incredibly fierce and furious. We talk about black metal bands sounding buzzy all the time, but this is a whole 'nother thing. The first track is some sort of ultimate demonic buzz direct from the fiery pit. A buzz that is sharp and jagged, so blown out and strangely panned, that it almost makes you dizzy listening to it. Careening like a pissed off swarm of hornets from speaker to speaker, the buzz distorts and crumbles, fades out and then swoops back in super hot and completely oversaturated. It definitely sounds like there is something seriously wrong with your speakers, in a GOOD way! And within that buzz is a twisting squirming vortex of fuzzy riffs, insanely blasting beats, shrieked vocals, all in a dense super complex tangle of black fury. One song was all it took. Not only were we totally and completely sold. We were also totally brutalized. Exhausted. Our ears beaten to a bloody pulp. And we LOVED it. The record veers wildly back and forth between impossibly brutal buzzing and more Burzumic midtempos with just a bit of a groove like Khold. But either way, the songs are dense and dark, furious and brilliantly fucked up. And that's not even taking into account the non-metal elements which are legion. Songs are peppered with weird sonic bits, and separated by haunting interludes that range from creepy children singing to women screaming in terror, stretches of industrial pummel with skittery drum machines and super processed Laibachian Teutonic growls to dreamy blissed out minor key jangle with Mark E. Smith sort-of-spoken vocals, massive glacial dirgescapes of downtuned sludge, peppered with Godflesh style beats to weird folky foresty ambience. But unlike a lot of bands, those bits are just that, bits, little bits of unlikely shading, small demented complements to the bands furious metallic onslaught.
That is until you get to the epic fourteen minute closing track. A vast expanse of weird record crackle spread in a thick patina over soaring minor key strings and distant muted drums. Creepy and dreary, but sort of super emotional and sublime. It sounds a bit like an old scratched up Godspeed 45 being played on a Victrola while on another Victrola, someone is playing a super scuffed copy of some old Scorn 12" on the wrong speed, the machine like beats perfectly drifting into the majestic grandeur of the strings and swoonsome ambience. After a brief bit of silence, we're suddenly tossed into some sort of weird eighties sounding synth rock, a bizarre electronic drums drenched video game music sort of jam that is just totally twisted and not a little bit out of place. It eventually morphs into a more metal version of Goblin, creepy and slightly cheesy with big thick distorted guitars laid over top. Woah.
A definite contender twisted black metal record of the year for sure!
Vadim's super slow motion hip hop minimalism has been funked up with some west coast style turntable tricks ala Skratch Piklz or Cut Chemist. Vadim has also employed a wide variety of vocal talents (including EI-P, BMS, Skinnyman, etc.) but the highlight is Sarah Jones completely non-pretentious femminist reinterpretation of The Last Poets!
Remix of Vadim's USSR Repertoire, including an Oval mix.
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Reissue of a 1978 album, originally released by the Italian avante garde label Cramps in their Nova Musicha series, of almost maddeningly repetitive electronic music by Argentinian composer Horacio Vaggione. Spacey, cosmic, "multilayered sci-fi epic glop"
There's two LP-side-long tracks here. Track one is seventeen minutes of relentless burbling, recorded in 1971 with an IBM computer. Track two is a duet for mini-Moog and Yamaha organ that takes off from the madness of track one to end with a pretty keyboard fanfare of near prog-pop proportions, which in 1978 could have potentially been a hit, with heads anyway.
This disc drove Andee insane (he thinks it sounds like Tangerine Dream on speed), but Allan liked it quite a bit (he also thinks it sounds like Tangerine Dream on speed)!
Oooh. Nice one, this. If you dig psychedelic dronemusic, heavy on the guitar, that is, 'cause it's the 2nd album on the ever-reliable Utech label from this droney duo from China, one half of which is none other than freeform electric guitarist & sculptor-of-feedback Li Jianhong, whose solo album on Japanese psych label PSF, Classic Of the Mountains And Seas, we made a Record Of The Week a few years back. The other half of the band is laptopper Vavabond, and together they create a dark and disturbing, yet sometimes somewhat soothing symphony of cosmic sci-fi space drone (VagusNerve are kind of big into UFOs and flying saucers), full of strange sounds. Layers of Jianhong's whale call guitar and swarms of other unidentifiable electronic drones (from keening high end to bassy lows) are ofttimes joined by weird wordless vocals, druggy mumbles, the guttural moans of some human creature. This devolved baby-babble is however buried beneath the burbling electronic FX and quasi-melodic guitar wail. What sound like distant air raid sirens rise and fall, as abstract alien transmissions from across the galaxy shower down over the three loooong tracks here, "The Memory Of Light", "The Exiled Life", and "Go Back To The Sirius" - as in, this is sirius tripping balls music!! To be played LOUD, if you dare. These aren't airy ambient drones. It's all quite dense and physical and maybe even frightening, with Jianhong's amp burning blackest on that third track, at times coming close to Keiji Haino in an echoing realm of insane video game zips and zaps.
Recommended drones for sure, a no-brainer if you trust us, or Utech, or are already a VagusNerve and/or Li Jianhong fan. Comes in a nice Utech-designed fold-up sleeve, with cool art appropriate to the dark spacey sounds on the disc.
This fellow we know recently wrote an entertaining book called Get High Now, no not about drugs, but about other sorts of highs, non-drug related natural techniques to enjoy "sensory trips" and the like. Quite a few of them are sound-based (the book even references Ryoji Ikeda at one point) but in a major oversight, a recommendation to "listen to VagusNerve" was left out! 'Cause it's definitely a trip when you really settle into a session with VagusNerve on the stereo or better yet headphones - likewise of course with a lot of other drone musics too, why do you think we like the stuff so much? Loud enough, it'll either stimulate, or at least simulate, a high.
So, c'mon, get high now with Chinese guitar/laptop duo VagusNerve. Someone calling herself VAVABOND is the laptopper, and Li Jianhong (of D!O!D!O!D!) is the guitar player. We're already considerable fans of Li's solo psych/noise guitar excursions (his disc on aRCHIVE for instance, and a fantastic new one on PSF, Classic Of the Mountains And Seas) so we were excited when we found out he's half of VagusNerve. We were also interested to learn what exactly the lo pan of the title is. As the liner notes explain, it's a traditional Chinese mytho-technological device, a sort of Feng Shui compass. A rotating disc in a wooden base, with several concentric rings of Chinese characters to which the needle in the middle can point, indicating various arcane things.
VagusNerve are not actually using a lo pan to make this music, rather it's inspired by a dream Li had about a giant lo pan in a forest that could be used to summon UFOs! That's pretty much the title of the first track, in fact. And swarming cosmic UFOs looking for mystical feng shui advice definitely could be making some of the sounds heard here. It's nervous, very active drone musick, buzzing and zapping and crackling and chiming, featuring 3 long tracks (8:21, 21:05, 28:27). There's much moody sci-fi windiness, and what sounds like flocks of otherworldly birds crying to one another, amidst thick grinding whooshing sizzling drones, spinning and swirling. Feedback a la underwater whale calls, resonant "long wire" like vibrations, insectoid buzzings, and mechanical rhythms all feature in the the mix. It's a sonic delirium, wherein Urthona is jamming opaquely with KK Null, if that hypothetical comparison is of any help to you.
Definitely another cool Utech release, a label we've been raving about lately for many good reasons (Horseback, Gog, Aluk Todolo, Blood Fountain...). Regarding Li Jianhong, hopefully we'll be reviewing that new PSF disc of his very soon. And, by the way, he also made several appearances on that An Anthology Of Chinese Experimental Music box set we listed last time.
We're so glad to finally see this available, the lovely 1971 debut of Spanish female psych-folk duo, Vainica Doble. One of Spain's most collectable and sought after soft-psych artifacts, Vainica Doble combine Beatlesy pop with Incredible String Band like whimsical flair, often sounding like the prettiest moments of Os Mutantes, the groovier moments of England's Sunforest or even early Abba at their most balladic, due to the singers' beautiful dual harmonies. Featured on the Finder's Keeper's comp, Folk Is Not A Four Letter Word vol. 2, it's about time that this venerable Spanish duo finally gets some deserved recognition outside of their homeland. Included here are the 12 tracks from their original album and 8 bonus tracks comprised of rare singles, including a track by their backing band, Tickets (who recorded a song written by the duo) as well as an awesome fuzz-pop stomper called "Someone Like Me", that makes this amazing reissue even more worthy of your time!
More and more quiet goes the solo album for Mika Vainio, the Finnish electronic wizard who has brought us such feats of techo-minimalist intensity as the Kesto 4cd boxset set in Pan Sonic and the Metri album recorded as an O with slash through it. But under his own name, Vainio's recordings shrink from existence in the wake of gasping, nocturnal bouts of silence. That said, comparisons to the very-special-nothing-music of Bernhard Gunter (whatever happened to that guy?) or Richard Chartier don't really apply to Vainio's work. There's much more in common here with the 2009 release Vectors from Robert Hampson (also released through Touch), as a revamped interpretation of INA-GRM concrete / electronic compositions from the '60s and '70s. Vainio's palette of sound rotates between chorales of electrical static, snarls of sawtooth buzzings, and cold sinewave generation with a few field recordings thrown in for good measure; and Vainio composes these elements by way of the razor-cut more often than not. Thus, Aineen Musta Puhelin is a fragmentary collage, at times marked by sharpened, Tesla-coil bursts of engorged electricity only to snap to a blackened frame of silence or at least prolonged inactivity.
The cool thing about records like this, and this kind of music in general on vinyl, is that it's difficult to tell if a record is scratched, or if there's fuzz on the needle, as those are the sounds that have been harnessed to create the rhythms. Crackle and pop, hiss and skip, the more beat up the record, the more complex and abstract the rhythm. But for the sake of this review, we'll assume the copy of the new Touch single by Pan Sonic's Mika Vainio we listened to was indeed pristine�
The A side opens with a super minimal loop, seemingly crafted from the run off groove of an old record. A stripped down skeletal groove made from a bit of hiss and crackle, laid over a gorgeous blurred murky loop, that slowly builds and builds as the rhythms remains static, simple, hypnotic, the whole thing very abstract and quite lovely.
The flipside also begins with a super minimal rhythm, again, assembled from bits of vinyl detritus, this one too looped over a slow building drone, but this side is a bit more intense, the background sounds slightly more corrosive, while managing to remain subtly musical. At some moments, because of the staticky rhythm, it does almost sound like some dreamy drone 7" that got all scuffed up, especially when the music drops out and the needle settles into the locked runoff groove, where it stays, playing out the rhythm that began the track over and over and over.
Latest in Touch's recent 7" series, like all Touch releases, beautifully packaged, with a simple spare design and adorned with gorgeous photos by label head honcho Jon Wozencroft.
The bruised Mika Vainio that was photographed on the smoldering 2011 solo album Life (... It Eats You Up) has mellowed out from the caterwauling guitar destruction and amphetamine-driven electronic noise to produce a reductionist album of electro-acoustics in Fe3O4. With the major exception in the aforementioned Life (... It Eats You Up), Vainio's solo work under his given name aligns neatly with the decentered abstraction that Touch has always been known for (e.g. John Duncan, BJ Nilsen, Thomas Koner, The Hafler Trio, etc.), with the blistered post-techno rhythms of Pan Sonic being deflated into a solitary muffled thump or a Geiger counter click punctuating his nocturnal experiments with power-drone stasis, power-grid hums, and slumped silence. Vainio draws inspiration here from the vast allegorical properties of iron. The directionality of a pre-GPS compass, the ability to store data through ferric oxide on magnetic tape, and the corrosion of steel all speak through Vainio's spacious compositions with often sublime, subtle results. "Magnetia" opens with the slashing acoustic rasp from a bowed cymbal akin to the classic Organum sound that collapses under the weight of a linear rumbling frequency. Ghostly utterances of searing noise slide out subdued space-time ambience on "Magnetotactic" and "Magnetism" as almost heavily dubbed versions of his previous album. The album's finale - "Elvis's TV Room" - eschews the magnetic metaphors even as it follows suit with the other tracks of eerie calm, blustery noise, and minimalist gestures.
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It would be nice to think that after a long day of hammering shards of technotic minimalism from the handbuilt electronics of Pan Sonic, Mika Vainio sleeps next to these machines, operating them in his dreams, their toggles triggered in cybernetic response to the colorful pools of abtract imagery in his subconscious, while at the same time capturing the soothing comfort of a room being slept in at 4 in the morning. While such technology may be entirely out of reach (even for the talented circuit builders of Pan Sonic), Vainio's "Kajo" is a beautiful placid album of serial electrical events that could have been the result of such a sleep-composition. Very nice.
Kilo finds our man Mika Vainio returning to the rhythm and noise once again, and very few people have ever done that combination as successfully as this Finnish electronic artist. Vainio's career, as you probably know, began in the early '90s through the project Panasonic (which later had to be rechristened as Pan Sonic for obvious reasons), with slippery grids of pure-tone bleeps and clinical atmospheres haunted a swaggering techno that aligned in equal parts with Plastikman, Suicide, and Throbbing Gristle. The monumental 4cd set Kesto by Pan Sonic from 2004 marked one of the most exhaustive statements of experimental electronica EVER produced; and the resulting world tour led to the collapse of the Pan Sonic. Vainio remained steadfast in his solo productions since the demise of Pan Sonic, alternating his major albums between the rhythmic workouts and sleepless landscapes of drone-splattered electro-acoustics. Even on an off day, Vainio's rhythmic explorations are at the top of the heap... And on Kilo, Mika Vainio is in top form. His post-techno, breakbeat rhythms have always enjoyed a bad-ass swagger, and those grooves persist on Kilo through an industrial barrage of jackhammered sequencing, Martin Rev-esque pulsations, and cyclotron velocities spun from his analogue noiseboxes. Another very impressive album from Mr. Vainio!
Sure, this is the solo album on which Pan Sonic's Mika Vainio picks up the guitar, but the sounds that he wrangles from that instrument are not all that dissimilar from those he crafted on the final Pan Sonic album Gravitoni, and especially on the first half of their 4cd opus Kesto. There's long been a swagger to the low-slung electronic rhythm and noise that brought Pan Sonic closer to an electro-punk rockabilly sound by simulating a snarling guitar with accelerating riffs of synthesized distortion that had more in common with the growl of a motorcycle than the squelch of an 808. So, when Vainio switches out his tone generators for a guitar, he's still got all the tools to distort, corrode, and disintegrate the sounds of six strings with considerable aplomb. The drum machines, the spatialized approach to editing, the white hot shards of electricity, the swarming noise, and Vainio's ability to control all of his cacophonic sounds are all present on Life (...It Eats You Up). "Mining" is an exemplary track displaying Vainio's ability to work a brutalist noise-guitar riff into his jittery industrial groove, sounding something like a downtuned Big Black or loosened-up Godflesh. Many will comment on Vainio's cover of The Stooges "Open Up And Bleed" which strikes a glam rock strut with drum track and smolderingly dissonant guitar riffs. It must be said that Vainio's cover of Pink Floyd's "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun" on Oleva was a better choice; but this one is pretty damn good too. The rock-n-roll mimesis of these tracks disintegrates over the remainder of the album, where splinters of guitar noise pop through walls of electrified drone, ominous hums, and demolished doom-laden ambience which aren't too far from the realms of KTL or Black Boned Angel. Pretty fucking great.
Mika of Panasonic's solo album, almost an hour of squeaks, subsonic rumbles, ear piercing whistles and barely audible drones. Either your favorite record of the year or you couldn't care less...
This single from the Finnish electronica giant Mika Vainio (one half of the Pan Sonic duo) was meant to be available as a special release on Record Store Day, but it arrived about a week late. These things, of course, do happen. But we've got 'em now, and while RSD 2012 is past, these are still crazy limited, and most likely will be gone in a flash!
Mostly when Vainio records under his given name, his electronics are thoroughly abstracted and dislocated from the rhythmic strategies he produces in Pan Sonic. Those recordings tend to be strange, dream-time excursions of Tesla coil charges and mad-scientist fizzle, but here on this single, Vainio returns to the 'rhythm', which has long been his strong suit. The A side is grinding, shuffle-techno number whose heavy rhythmic swagger and cycloramic distortion locks in step with the Pan Sonic albums Kesto and Gravitoni. The B side is a tad mellower with a groovy noirish rhythm, but equally as dark. One time pressing of 750 copies!
Revitty? Might that have something to do with Martin Rev? It's hard to say if the word means anything other than simple being a title for this solo project from Mika Vainio, one of the two shockheaded Finns behind Pan Sonic. As the electron wrangler for Suicide, Martin Rev has clearly been a major influence on Vainio's work, especially in how to extend electronic sounds through dynamic usage of pattern, repetition, and variation. Both Pan Sonic and Suicide have always been known for the rhythmic pounding of their scalding electric minimalism; yet in most of Vainio's solo work, the rhythmic structures are merely hinted at through nuanced implications or entirely done away with in the spirit of grand abstractions. What's left for Vainio's sound sculpting is raw energy often recklessly unleashed in radioactive bursts with only ghostly hints at a pulsing electricity within. So maybe we're grasping at straws to add some context to this work, but it's still a mighty fine piece of Finnish electronic abstraction, chock full of bleakness and aggression.
Best known as half of the minimalist techno duo Pan Sonic with Ilpo Vaisainen, Mika Vainio has crafted a variety of electro-acoustic techniques that bare little resemblance to his contemporaries in glitched electronica. Marked as much by his use of space as by the quality of his abstraction of sound, Vainio's recordings under his given name even stand apart from his solo projects such as �, Tekonivel, and Philus. As Vainio, he has shed all of the intertwining rhythmic assualts found elsewhere, but continues to pursue a crystalline frigidity in his investigations of sound. "Sokeiden Maassa Yksisilmainen On Kuningas" (which translated from the Finnish as "In the Land of the Blind One-Eyed Is King") opens with a harsh blast of digitized noise that settles down into a ominous soundscape punctuated by a flanging bass pulse and distant isolationist drones. Smatterings of prolonged silence take up a considerable amount of time within Vainio's album, and provide parallels to the French attitudes of musique concrete (i.e. Lionel Marchetti, Luc Ferrari, etc.) But it's drones that give Vainio's work such dynamism and expressivity, at times standing in as sustained chords from a grimy organ and others as creepy swells of "Forbidden Planet" style electronics.
Time Examined is a monograph that documents Mika Vainio's scores for installation, film, theater, and performance, sounding very much like the work that Vainio has been releasing through Touch in recent years. As most folks probably already know, Vainio is half of the minimalist techno project Pan Sonic, but his solo work has become increasingly devoid of rhythm, with suspended tones, industrially-minded field recordings, prolonged electrical gasps, explorations into signal decay, and metallic echoes cast upon a black canvas of expansive nothingness. These installations within employ numerous visual cues - vintage clocks, old lightbulbs, transistor radios, vacuum tubes, Soviet-era electrical components, industrial films from the 1940s, and other ephemeral equipment from science laboratories from a past era. There had always been something elegantly retrograde about Vainio's electronic tinkerings with sound, and his installation work certainly reinforces this reading into his work. The accompanying 92 page book features tons of images from these installations, films, performances, and dance pieces with accompanying texts from CM von Hausswolff and Daniela Cascella. The first of the two cds features scores from over the past 15 years; and the second disc features the tone-plus-bleep split 1997 release Mikro Makro that Vainio produced alongside Carsten Nicolai (then recording just as Noto). A very nicely designed document!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Following the bleak shiftings of sound on his albums "Okno" and "Ydin", Vainio (who also works in Pan Sonic and has a list of pseudonyms including �, Kentolevi, Tekonivel, and Philus) sets up the electrostatic buzz of his Complex Sound Generator against the body cavity throb of huge slo-mo beats. An excellent (if only 20 minutes long, lacking in artwork, and very hard-to-find) document from this AQ-beloved electronica artist.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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'Ydin' is a limited edition release of 750 copies of dark haunting electronic minimalism. Raster has proclaimed this to be best solo project from Vainio (of Pan Sonic, 0, Philus, Kentolevi, Tekonivel). Certainly it's in the running. As one of Vainio's non-beat oriented psychoacoustic compositions, Ydin is an exploration of electricity buzzing with delicate pulses, slashing noises, and eerie reverberations. Excellent!
The second in the "Invisible Archecture" series of live collaborations from Audiosphere is Christian Fennesz and Mika Vainio from Pan Sonic. Housed like the Jeck / Tetreault / Yoshihide album in the annoying "super jewel box," this features a 34 minute
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Mika Vainio of Pan(a)sonic and Sahko fame, Pita of Mego, and minimalist Charlemange Palestine each composed and performed a piece for machines (duh) that include the electric siren and 'bell tree'. The one collaboration between Pita and Mika Vainio is certainly worth the price of admission alone... 12 minutes of sublime murky beep and click composed entirely out of the processed sounds of typewriters!!!
Panasonic team up with Alan Vega of Sucide fame for a full-length!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Vaisanen is one half of Pan Sonic with Mika Vainio, and presents his contribution to what may be the coolest series for 1999. Noton / Raster has commissioned 12 electro-minimalists to reconstitute 20 minutes for the next millenium. Vaisanen is clearly the brutalist of Pan Sonic (where as Vainio is the sublimist) presenting harsh tones coupled with electronica 4/4 pulses.
Ilpo Vaisanen hasn't had nearly as prolific a solo career as Mika Vainio - his companion in Pan Sonic who has a plethora of solo projects under his own name and as Ø, Philus, Tekonivel, and Kentolevi. "Asuma" is actually his first full album, finding a good home on Mego. After his electro-rhythm crunch which he contributed to Raster / Noton's "20 to 2000" series and a hard to find 12" of similar post-techno damage, we were surprised that his debut solo project had more more in common with Vainio's dreamy electro-acoustic collages.
"Asuma" acoustically feels as if it is intentionally paralleling the optical phenomenon of a mirage -- with wavering textures that never provide much definition to objects near the horizon in an environment of oppressive heat. Vaisanen keeps the subtle rhythmic elements (perhaps generated by voltage fluctuations rather than drum machines) submissive to the hot-wired buzzing drones from ill-tempered cable groundings. Really sublime and quite unassuming.
