Finland's Lal Lal Lal label is one of those cottage industry imprints that's always got something interesting going on, regardless of who's paying attention, releasing a diverse selection of lo-fi hijinks from (mostly) fellow Finnish freaks such as Fricara Pacchu, Avarus, and Maniacs Dream, though they've got some international friends on the roster as well like Howlin' Magic and The Skaters. Apparently a bunch of their acts got together last year for a festival, making rare live appearances some of 'em, and to have something to special to sell at the fest they produced this limited edition compilation cassette, containing tracks from Semimuumio, Suohumala, Fricara Pacchu, Astral Social Club, and Pylon. That's four from Finland and one (ASC, aka Neil Campbell) from the UK.
Side 1 is the "danceable" side, perhaps (seriously, they get a groove on). It begins with the "emotional, adult-oriented beat" 'tronica of Semimuumio, a cheerfully synth-laden instrumental ditty, the synthwork getting wilder and more warped as the piece picks up its pace. Then Suohumala chimes in with another pleasant groover, incorporating classical-Casio sounds and a bit of a burbling reggae dub vibe. AQ fave Fricara Pacchu comes next, his track a stomping one with thick flanged-out riffs, all-instrumental like the ones before. Finally on side 1, Astral Social Club's style of cacophonic cut-up loops and beats and effects brings a chaotic throb to the proceedings. All very nice.
The cacophony continues on the second side, but in a more freeform fashion, with interesting abstract stuttering and staggered sounds, blips and bleeps and glitched out skree from Pylon, who gets the whole side for this somewhat noisier and much longer track than the others. It's pretty cool too.
This entertaining artifact comes in the form of an opaque white plastic cassette, with the J-card cover looking to us oddly very early '90s desktop publishing in its graphical execution. Sadly, Lal Lal Lal say they're winding things up label-wise so this may be one of their last ever releases...
From far north in Finland, the Fonal label, home to Es, Kiila, and a bunch of other fine bands, has just released a compilation focusing not only on their countryfolk but also likeminded artists from around the world. Psychedelic, experimental, indie,
Floating Flower is an Acid Mothers Temple side project, featuring Kawabata Makoto on acoustic guitar, Yuki on vocals and violin, and Kaneko Tetsuya on tabla and electric guitar. A very lovely six minute track indeed. The P.G. Six track is another of his fragile, folk/psych compositions featuring just his voice, acoustic guitar, and piano. Greg Weeks, Janne Laurila, Ring, Ville Leinonen, and, well, quite a few of the artists on here take a much similar approach: sparse, homerecorded songs that are both quiet and melancholy (of course, some are better singers than others...). Fursaxa (who just played here in San Francisco with fellow psychedelic Philadelphians Bardo Pond) combines droning organ and sustained, sad female vocals. Scorces (members of Charalambides and Ash Castles On The Ghost Coast) does something similar, using bells instead of drones to back their extended, wordless vocal duet. Kinda creepy. The disc concludes with Kemialliset Ystavat's beautiful hippy-chant-folk-jam "Milla", which could have been an International Harvester outtake. This comp is very Ptolemaic Terrascope, to say the least! We like.
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.
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.
Another release from Finland's Fonal records, related in membership (and thus not surprisingly also sound-wise) to Es and Kiila. Velvolino are a mostly instrumental guitar-bass-drums trio whose compositions range from moody and mellow to more energetic, foot-tapping fare, reminding us of everything from fellow Finns and AQ-faves Circle to the Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet to film noir soundtracks! Throw in jazz flourishes, organ on the appropriately titled, Bohren-like "Sicilian Dirge", and the mysterious field recordings that crop up between some tracks, and you have an excellent, eclectic listening experience. Oh, and the lone vocal track "How To Make Love Quietly" strangely enough makes us imagine an unthinkable Circle / Weezer collaboration! So yeah, we said 'eclectic', yet Tango does have a cohesive sound of its own. Another lovely release from Fonal's Sami Sanpakkila and friends!
Yet another collection of fantastic and far out musical weirdness from Finnish madman Verde, also known as Mika Rintala, one time member of Circle and Extroverde, but by now, much better known as a mad scientist instrument builder, whose records are constructed using the various and sundry electronic devices Rintala designs and assembles. The inside cover of Verde's new disc offers up a cool snapshot of some of these contraptions, all brightly colored, with tubes and switches and levers and speakers and knobs, and all placed in front of a field of blossoming flowers.
They may be pretty and colorful, but those machines can create pretty out there sounds, which Rintala deftly mixes with bits of jazz, looped droniness, and hypnotic rock. Fans of Circle and the various Circular offshoots will definitely find much to love here. Analog synths swoop and shimmer, wrapped around a repetitive guitar figure and some sizzling cymbals, deep pulsing bass tones throb underneath atonal steel string clang. The result a little bit new age, a little bit abstract electro, pretty hard to describe, as is the whole disc, from old timey jazz accompanied by what sounds like whales songs, wreathed in tape hiss and whirring fuzz, to ominous downtuned looped low end rhythms, peppered with percussive thumps, and squalls of creepy robotic buzz, to wildly malfunctioning electronics wrapped around off kilter guitars and thick sheets of feedback, to gorgeously warped chamber music, played on what sounds like the inside of a piano and some thick warbly rubber band strings, to gorgeous minimal rhythmscapes, with muted percussion, and mesmerizingly woozy melodies, fractured detuned steel string guitar, found sounds, a men's choir speaking not singing and more weird sounds and musics than we could ever find words for.
The cool thing about Verde records, and this one is no different, is that these are not just collections of 'weird sounds', or even sonic experiments, these are actual proper (or perhaps IMproper) songs, pieces, movements, they just so happen to be composed and recorded using a motley collection of hand assembled machines, which if anything, makes the music of Verde more bizarre, but also, way more special and unique.
A while back we reviewed the self titled debut from Ethiopian-Finnish guitarist/vocalist Mirel Wagner, released on local label Friendly Fire, and we were pretty smitten, a haunting collection of lush, almost murder ballads, the sound crystalline and clear, but the vibe and the mood murky and ominous. Not sure what we were expecting, but it definitely wasn't something nearly that bleak and dark. And with a jump to Sub Pop, we were perhaps expecting Wagner to deliver something more polished, less intimate, less sonically harrowing than that debut, but we're beginning to think this is just where she wants to be, and while it sounds like a frightening, heart breaking place to be, she manages to make it sound strangely inviting.
Right from the opener, Wagner conjures up a mysterious world of sound, one that's mostly just guitar and vocals, the guitar generally spare, the vocals deep, and smokey, "1 2 3 4" is almost like a lullaby or a nursery rhyme, but one of those cautionary tales, that warns children what terrible end awaits if they disobey. "The Dirt" is a bit folkier, but has the same sort of sinister vibe, a dark slo-mo folk-blooze, that again, seem to be all about loss and death, the sounds as spare as they are, wreathed in clouds and shadow, and emotionally overcast, and soul baring threnody.
And even later in the record, when the sound blossoms, and the production follows suit, the music stays dark and mournful, every track some kind of lament, and when the subtle strings surface, it only adds to the pretty pathos. The rest of the record finds an uneasy balance between darkly psychedelic dreamfolk ("The Devil's Tongue"), haunting chamber folk ("Dreamt Of A Wave"), and moody almost country ("What Love Looks Like"). The more we listen, the more it makes sense that this record ended up on Sub Pop, as it wouldn't be entirely out of place on your shelf somewhere in-between Fleet Foxes, Red Red Meat, Iron & Wine and Codeine, although wherever it ended up, would darken that corner of your collection considerably. Haunting, harrowing and pretty goddamn fantastic.
As long time readers of the aQ list no doubt know by now, we definitely have a thing for Finnish music, and Finnish music of all stripes, be it freaky forest folk, churning metallic hypnorock, twisted outsider cabaret, or progged out whatthefuck weirdness, but not all Finnish music is so flat out twisted, there's plenty of other amazing stuff going on, a lot of which we're not always hip to. Which is why we can thank local label Friendly Fire for introducing us to Ethiopian-Finnish folk singer Mirel Wagner, who conjures up a darkly haunting soundworld of bleak murder balladry, and grim blackened doom folk, her voice gorgeous and mysterious, childlike at times, but definitely with a chilling world weariness, perfectly accompanied by Wagner's spare skeletal acoustic guitar, the sound alternatingly clear and crystalline, murky and deeply reverbed, but always lush and lovely, hypnotic and tranced out, the vibe bleak and brooding, the soundtrack for shadowy late nights, for vast expanses of wind swept emptiness, the sort of mysterious songsmithery you might expect to discover next to a campfire, in some post apocalyptic otherworld, a dusty cloaked figure, hunched over the fire, face obscured by shadows, fingers deftly moving along the neck of a battered old guitar, the music drifting heavenward, through clouds of fireflies bleeding into fields of glimmering stars, Wagner's music like some end of the world lullaby. So gorgeous.
The awesomely titled Might Of The Planet Eater is the latest from mysterious Finnish one man band Will Over Matter, which just so happens to be the work of a fella by the name of Harald Mentor, who you might know better as the maniac behind avant outsider not-quite-black-metal weirdos Ride For Revenge. So if the low end rhythmic weirdness that is Ride For Revenge is one step removed from black metal, imagine Will Over Matter as about 5 or 6 steps past that. Not black metal at all, but more like some sort of outsider electronica.
Our obsession with Ride For Revenge stems from the fact that over the course of their career, their sound has changed to the point where they are now totally subverting and transforming the idea of black metal into something much more primal and rhythmic, forgoing the buzz and blast and replacing those obvious BM tropes with looped mesmer and tribal pound, stripping the sound down to its essence, and then slowing it down as well, sounding more to us like Aluk Todolo than Beherit. Although the mention of Beherit, another Finnish black metal institution seems particularly apt here, in that Beherit are infamous for their non-black metal output, their experimental electronics, which is precisely what Will Over Matter is. If Ride For Revenge is Mentor's twisted take on black metal, well then Will Over Matter is his skewed attempt at power electronics, or industrial music, channeling the spirit of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Whitehouse, and all the rest, but filtered through some sort of cracked and damaged blackened Finnish lens.
Will Over Matter combines the stripped down rhythmic minimalism of Ride For Revenge with experimental industrialism, melding lumbering beats to fields of spaced out static, wrapping sheets of Merzbowian noise around shuffling low end thrum and machinelike beats, adding distorted alien vox to squalls of glitched out electronics, or winding multiple streams of electronic information into strangely twisted sonic barrages.
The opening track here is a bizarre soundscape of chittery electronics, of twisted feedback and growled super distorted vocals, pelted by grinding crunch and skittering squelches, a strange array of bleeps and bloops, and buried within, a sort of almost rhythmic bit of ever shifting static, which leads directly into the next track, a droned out stretch of pulsing electronic shimmer, which manages to sound spaced out and sinister at the same time, the tone and timbre switching constantly creating, again, it's own sort of psychedelic rhythm. It's not until "Read The Signs", track number three, that the various elements coalesce into what is really the core of WoM's sound, another fluctuating field of static, of strange space-y electronics, bits of glitch and hiss, but wound around a lumbering, skeletal beat, some sort of alien krautrock, before switching gears, and becoming a weirdly propulsive throbbing electronica, but with elements of kraut/post/space rock, at it's most propulsive sounding a bit like Bastard Noise offshoot and former Record Of The Week-ers Geronimo, and at its least, like nothing you've ever heard before. The track offers up strange electronic squiggles, sinister high end buzz, all in the surface of trailing behind that motorik beat, which itself is in constant flux, cymbals popping out of the mix, processed and all dubby, while the various electronics get more and more tangled and frantic.
Then there's the sprawling 24 minute "Stone Cold Heart", a super spare and abstract stretch of blackened rhythms, and distant buzz and shimmer, that buzz, growing ever more insistent, the vocals here not so distorted, more ominous and intense, intoning some sort of ritual, over what almost sounds like a black metal Pole, minus the barrage of wildly buzzing synths, and primitive analog electronic tones.
One of our favorite tracks is the gorgeously droned out and hypnotic "Forever Nameless" that seems to inadvertently channel John Carpenter and Goblin, into something much more dark and sinister, a totally mesmerizing rhythm, wound up in a thick, corrosive buzzing low end melody, while way off in the distance, a Burzum like synth melody plays out, again reminding us of a less noisy Aluk Todolo, totally hypnotic, the vocals here are almost sung, wrapped in a weird warped distortion, the end result like some sort of doomy drone pop slowcore or something.
Throughout the remainder of these two discs, WoM stretch out strangely stiff rhythms, or pull apart robotic electro beats into weirdly metallic anti-grooves, which unwind lazily beneath hazy streaks of static, creating a series of tarpit crawls, often swallowed whole by heaving walls of electronic sound, that seem to emulate the sheer crumbling power of SUNNO))-like doomdronedirge, but are more often left to pulse, and pound, and throb, a strange alien death march, as the label describes these rituals, each ritual an "epic journey through inner knowledge, lunar madness and cosmic superpowers of satanic possession", the twisted bastard child of some dark forest, outer space ritualized mating of industrial music, black metal, power electronics and krautrock, brilliantly baffling and maddeningly mesmerizing, by now, it should be easy for you to tell if this is your cup of seriously spiked tea or not, and for most of you, we imagine it must be. Fans of Ride For Revenge, Aluk Todolo, Geronimo, Mammal, Bastard Noise, This Heat, spaced out ritualistic blackened electronics and fucked up Finnish weirdness, this one's for you...
Back in 2011, we made Might Of The Planet Eater, the debut from weirdo minimal blackened power electronic one man band Will Over Matter our Record Of The Week. We initially discovered WOM via the fact that the 'one man' behind that one man band, was none other than Harald Mentor, mastermind of aQ beloved Finnish rhythmic black metal minimalists Ride For Revenge, who for some crazy reason, we just realized, have never nabbed Record Of The Week honors, cuz in retrospect, any/all of their previous records were more than deserving.
As we mentioned in our reviews of the other Will Over Matter records, if you thought Ride For Revenge were weird, then prepare theyself to be blown away, baffled, confused, frustrated, thrilled, unnerved, disturbed, most likely all of the above. Will Over Matter takes the dense rhythmic churn, already sort of spaced out and abstract, and replaces the bass and drums and traditional instruments, with what sounds like a battery of cobbled together electronics, home made machines and invented instruments, it's tough not to envision Mentor as some sort of mad scientist, in his murky musical laboratory, surrounded by walls of primitive electronics, old computers, blinking lights, blown speakers, a room full of towering obelisks of obsolete technology, harnessed into something otherworldly, and improbably next level. The sounds these machines emit glitchy and gristly, jagged and hiss-drenched, in some ways the template for WOM is the same as it was for Ride For Revenge, the 'band' locked into simple, lurching, lumbering motorik grooves, the 'beat' wrapped in dense sonic swirls, thick fields of static, everything glitched out and in-the-red. A head spinning sprawl of blackened kraut-noise synth-drone power-electronic minimalism, that RULES. Which brings us to the latest missive from Mentor, which is another psychedelic minimal electro-noise WTF doozy, the vocals kept to a minimum this time, the three lengthy tracks, spaced out and droney, slow shifting layers, constantly morphing textures, pulsing and pulsating, the sounds raw and gristly, the tracks maniacally repetitive and cyclical, in a way that to our ears is total tranced out bliss, but to less adventurous ears, might be just the opposite. The lack of 'song' and 'structure', not that there was that much of either on past WoM release, but even less so here, is precisely what makes Phenomenal Highways a whole different beast, at times, it's like past WoM records stripped down to their very skeletal essence, the opening track some sort of primitive kosmische ritual, a single synth locked and looped into a seemingly endless cycle of simple pulses, weirdly warbly and super distorted, a heartbeat like pulse wreathed in filthy, crusty synth squelch, that squirms and oozes, occasionally shaped into actual melodies, but more often than not droning and buzzing hypnotically, the final few minutes, finds the sounds transformed into weird lazer blast like blurts before suddenly blinking out.
The second track is even MORE minimal, a super spare soundscape that sounds like some mysteriously manipulated alien field recording, something you might here on Editions Mego, a field of crumpled low end crackle, muted and murky, peppered with little bits of percussion, the sound a weird bit of grinding muddy noise, it's not until 7 minutes in that the sound splinters, the background smoothing out into a whirring distorted drone, while Mentor delivers some demonic sermon over the top, his voice processed and doused in distortion, before the track explodes into a field of grinding electronics, tangled melodies, swirling tones, a robotic psych-noise freakout that manages to be more listenable than it has any right to be, a head spinning psychedelic churn that blossom into a final super blown out speaker shredding blowout, before oozing into the final track, a weird shuffling sprawl of rib cage rattling low end, dense subsonic tones delivered through what sounds like slow motion helicopter rotor wash, weirdly rhythmic and mesmeric, this minimal ooze and creep soon joined by strange curlicues of melody, the deep tone gathering all sorts of acoustic crunch as it goes, and once again, about seven minutes in, a super distorted blast of fractured blown out melody surfaces, giving the whole thing a seriously psychedelic vibe, those tones totally overtaking the rest of the sound, before fading out, and returning us to the slow-swell pulsations of the first half, only to fade out into a crackly sprawl of sculpted feedback, wreathed in hiss and hum, the sound smoldering and sinister, draped over a buried barely there rhythm, some echo drenched vocals in there too, everything sort of washed out and blurry, drifting beneath sheets of feedback and fields of staticky hum, all culminating in a final freaked out psych-noise squall, that does little to disguise the haunting melodic beauty that lurks within.
As always, amazing, bizarre and bafflingly brilliant, a dizzyingly abstract, twisted industrial psychedelic drone-noise masterpiece. That is of course also extremely limited...
