In 1994, on an album known as Minimal Nation, Detroit’s Robert Hood stripped Motor Metropolis funk to its bones. Most of its tracks have been manufactured from little greater than lithe, swinging drum programming and solitary synth patches that glistened like oil slicks; it’s usually thought of the origin level for what got here to be referred to as 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 have been a laboratory specimen. The place there are drum machines, they merely thump and hiss; his custom-built tone turbines 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 turn out to be greatest referred to as one half of Pan Sonic, a duo (with Ilpo Väisänen) that, from the early Nineteen Nineties till its dissolution in 2009, waged a scorched-earth marketing campaign in opposition to digital music’s staid conventions. But it surely was Vainio’s Ø alias—after an emblem signifying absence in quite a few contexts, from math and geometry to linguistics—that may 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 underneath his personal title, 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 demise. Working from notes he left behind, Tommi Grönlund, his buddy and founding father of the Sähkö label, and Rikke Lundgreen, Vainio’s former associate, compiled the fabric into Sysivalo, his closing album. (In response to Lundgreen, Vainio had already determined upon the album idea, title, observe order, and even cowl artwork.) The title—a portmanteau that means one thing like “charcoal mild”—is evocative and becoming. Vainio’s music typically felt like an apocalyptic conflict between being and nothingness, however on Sysivalo, darkness and light-weight circulate collectively in methods which can be uncommon for his work, evoking a dynamic combination of vulnerability, tenderness, and beauty.
Vainio’s music may generally sound like he had jacked straight into {an electrical} substation, however his palette right here is comfortable and tufted. Distant thunder takes on a purplish pastel hue, misted with white noise. There are few laborious assaults and even fewer moments the place the degrees bleed pink. 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 fingers. But there’s little doubt that Sysivalo is envisioned as an album—a single, overarching work, somewhat than a group of stray items. A ruminative temper pervades the hour, and tones and themes continuously repeat. The drawn-out foghorn blast that opens the album with “Etude 1” reappears, whittled to a nice 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.
