Pan Sonic - Finnish-style minimal techno

Question: Is it true that in one of your early performances you swallowed microphones?

Ilpo: Yes, back when me and Mika called ourselves "Sine", after Ultra 3. One of us swallowed the microphones and the other played his body by beating on his own torso.

Finland in the early Nineties is the cultural humus in which the Pan Sonic project is born and develops. That Scandinavian region, in those years, would rise to the headlines above all for the atrocities that would soon unfold within the black-metal underground scene. While the turmoil shaking Scandinavia helped turn the spotlight onto a peninsula that until then had been snubbed by most of the music establishment, it also led, more slowly, to the discovery of a particularly dynamic musical underground which, confined to the icy lands of Northern Europe, helped rethink some of the typical stylistic traits of European music production of that decade.

Pan Sonic is the name of the project that, across 17 years of activity, manages to innovate and bring fresh impetus to what we might call European electronic avant-garde. The Eighties close by registering the proliferation of new ways of understanding the man-machine relationship: from the nihilistic, noise-ridden depths typical of the British and continental European industrial wave, through to those forms of muscular electronics, typical of electro body music, that would go on to shape part of the evolution of minimal dance music.

The Vainio-Väisänen tandem indeed manages to reread these stylistic traits while informing them with the element that would become one of Pan Sonic's distinguishing features: namely, the digital. The era of analog production closes, and instead the epic of the new digital sound opens, with all the aseptic precision that this entails.

In little more than a quarter of a century, Pan Sonic managed to popularize, and therefore make accessible to a vast and heterogeneous audience, a sonic aesthetic in which noise chaos, introspective expanses and minimal rhythmic geometries manage to coexist harmoniously, and threateningly, pointing the way toward new paths of electronic minimalism in the Nineties and 2000s.

The story

It's 1993 when Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen first meet, somewhat by chance, in Finland. The former, born in 1963, had a background as a DJ, a growing passion for raves, the acid house then in vogue, and the pounding industrial unrest of Einsturzende Neubauten, Throbbing Gristle and Suicide, as well as hip-hop and reggae. Ilpo, meanwhile, always the calmer of the two, was a student likewise drawn to the world revolving around raves. Having met in Turku, they decide to form a group, Panasonic, which Sami Salo would join starting in 1994, though only for a couple of years.

The rise of the then-trio, who released an EP on Sähkö Recordings, is striking. Within a few months, they go from the best live clubs overseas to the legendary John Peel sessions. Their blend of algebraic, cold music wins over an audience that is at first niche, then increasingly wide (even MTV plays their videos).

From there on, it's one success after another.

The beginnings – Panasonic

In 1995 comes Vakio, the duo's first true full-length. A genuine snapshot of the Finns' early stylistic signature, Vakio is a glacial work. Across the fifteen tracks of this debut, Väisänen and Vainio transcend the song form, composing a hymn to machines and post-industrial civilization, an ideal black-and-white sketch for desolate lands.

Vakio offers a disorienting back-and-forth: more ambient tracks give way to pieces with a more compelling rhythmic section, and vice versa. Flattening out the more claustrophobic moods of the previous EP, Pan Sonic trace non-coordinates: "Alku" is dissonance to the nth degree, a spectral yet impalpable progression. The slightly grimy ambient-techno bounces of "RadioKemia" pave the way for the vague, anything-but-warm tribal hints of "Vaihe" (Black Dice owe them a debt of gratitude) and of the gorgeous "Hapatus", a track driven by a sharp rhythmic section that loops on replay. And between the mechanical tension of "Urania" and the sonic breath-holding of "Graf", Panasonic work constantly in sharp, clean-cut colors, leaving no room for gradual shifts in tone.

Vakio's obsession is the everyday, an everyday projected into a future made of signs and symbols. Between industrial blasts and stases anchored to the underground ("Reso", "Tela"), the Finnish duo arrives at the two unexpected aces of the closing stretch: "Kaasu" and "Sahkotin", separated by the ups and downs of "CSG-sonic", hit straight at the heart. The first unfolds over an ambient substrate, within which a very faint beat takes shape: we find ourselves immersed in a nocturnal forest, among owls and bats. The second, by contrast, lays down the law, opening with a gentle kick drum onto which subtle glitches and assorted acrobatics are grafted, in a constant rise.

The sound coined by Pan Sonic rises to symbolic status, a symbol of a future that's not too close and a past that's not too distant.

Critical acclaim establishes the project's importance almost immediately. A golden period opens up for the trio, with various collaborations, sellout shows and an ever-wider audience that will follow them faithfully. There's no desire to stop. Asked about the influences behind Vakio, Mika Vainio points to musique concrète, industrial and — a little surprisingly — reggae and ska.

The Osasto EP is undoubtedly one of the duo's sharpest efforts. Against industrial backdrops, the grimmest and most sinister clangs hurl themselves into a bitter war fought with horrific ambient carpets onto which dark, concentric beats are grafted. The robotic march of "Uranokemia" breaches the banks of human consciousness, turning sound into pure algebraic expression, born of cubic elevations and trigonometric melodies. The air raid never slows its supply of surface-to-air missiles, and "Telako" is a vivid, striking snapshot of it: a constant swarm of clustered explosions, with no let-up. And even where the storm seems to calm ("Parturi"), "Murto" relaunches the electric action, this time dissolving into a confused smokescreen.

The Japanese tour that will soon keep them busy marks a further step forward. While the noise element had been directly functional to the 4/4 techno structures, their exposure to Yamatsuka Eye of Boredoms changes their perception of noise, which now gets woven structurally into the tracks.

Kulma marks one of the high points of Vainio and Vasanen's entire career. Released in 1996, the album follows the thread laid down by Vakio, trying to smooth out its techno-ish drift in favor of a more intimate approach — if intimacy is even the right word here. Where the sound that emerges from Vakio leans into a cathartic, so to speak "total" imprint, Kulma instead plunges into minimalism. Don't be fooled by the android "Teurastamo", whose martial march, steeped in noise-grey gloom, is frightening — because starting with "Vapina", the beat grows ever tighter as it grows more isolated. Those deep ambient sabre-slashes no longer rear up; what stands out now is at times a colder rhythm section, at times silent vignettes on the brink of a vacuum.

The exception to the rule is "Puhdistus", which follows in the groove of the previous effort, between dry advances and granular blasts. Tracks like "Jackso", "Kylma Massa" and "Hahmo" turn toward muffled landscapes, frozen under a thin blanket of permafrost. And even where sunlight manages to filter through the firs, it won't be able to scratch the icy glaze. But the true legacy left by Pan Sonic can be heard in the cold simmer of "Murto Neste": machines in the service of man produce life, a crooked melody in fieri that casts its gaze beyond the hill (does "Beaches & Canyons" ring a bell?). The nocturnal croaking of frogs ("Kutnutus") opens the doors, like the calm before the storm, to the tracked advance of "Moottori", a battle-ready panzer-noise. Once again, dead center. Reworking the coordinates of their debut, the Finns have by now built a parallel dimension, as cold as it is robotic. Behind it are two men from the north — all things considered, we probably couldn't have expected anything different.

The Crowning Moment – Pan Sonic

Sometimes copyright is no joke, and a multinational like Panasonic sues the duo over the use of the Finns' name, and wins. An era thus closes, with Vainio and Väisänen forced to change their name to Pan Sonic. The substance, however, doesn't change.

A shuffles the deck even further. Partly shedding the noise outfit, the duo focuses on a clearer melodic construction. Except in the final part of A, the noise imprint fades in favor of a framework more tied to calmer beats and white geometric brushstrokes.

The opening "Maa" is an ambient gem, with glitches nestling at its edges and a spectral, unexpectedly mild progression. And while "Joksus" exposes itself to the white night of "Askel", the icy course of "Lomittain" grafts itself onto a slow flow. The dark-ambient traits of "Havainto" and "Etaisyys" follow "Johto 1", a treat for discerning ears: combine early Autechre with Japanese glitch and you get a gem of sonic progression. The spectral evolution of "Rajatila" or the gorgeous dissolution of "Johto 2", whose swarming on the shields melts into a thunderous cosmic deflagration, herald the stray shards of "Telakoe", which rain down with no let-up and set the stage for the implosion of the closing "Voima": the final track's nine minutes mark a return to the grimmest industrial, amid drone spasms and heavy pickaxe blows against stone.

The dawn of the new millennium for the Väisänen-Vainio tandem is called Aaltopiiri, another excellent move by the Finnish duo, again released on Blast First.

Aaltopiiri immediately presents itself as a summing-up of the Finnish duo's first six years of activity, a reckoning in which the band's recurring noise-rooted leanings are laid out, though skillfully reworked within suspended ambient grids and repeated digital pulses.

The apparent stasis marking the work inevitably confronts the total de-humanization of the sound expressed by Vainio and Väisänen. While in previous decades ambient unease and noise-driven agony were filtered through an analog production that, ultimately, still granted these sounds a glimmer of humanity, in the case of Pan Sonic — and of Aaltopiiri in particular — the personal, and therefore human, element is forcefully banished from the horizon, in favor of a desolation animated by digital algebraic micro-sequences that, while not displaying the feral instinctiveness of certain noise-ambient collages of the '90s, speak to a deep, pervasive underlying unease.

Three years after their last studio work, Finns Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen deliver to print an ambitious, complex and extremely varied album, made up of four long chapters that distill the insights of an entire career and offer plenty of food for thought on the future of a genre at high risk of atrophy.

Kesto (234.48.4) (the title states, in parentheses, the combined running time of the four compact discs) is in fact a bold work, one that synthesizes the Turku duo's musical influences and deepens them in a postmodern key, sublimating them into a fresh and compelling musical proposition. Nearly four hours of minimal techno, of convulsive repetitions worthy of the best Charlemagne Palestine, of constant nods to the industrial glacial chill of Throbbing Gristle and the claustrophobic synthetic melodies of Cabaret Voltaire, of glitch fibrillations that nervously undermine the weave of a sonic fabric that's static and uniform only in appearance: Kesto (234.48.4) is a genuine monument to the contemporary.

The first compact disc is marked by an expressive ferocity that seems to draw its roots from music of the industrial era ("Louhi"), with sounds of leaden vapor that worm their way into the listener's psyche and rise to the level of genuine everyday paranoia ("Mutaattori/Mutator", "Vähentajä/Diminsher"). Hostile rhythms, obsessive clanking, motor-like accelerations: everything contributes to making this album an excellent soundtrack for a disco-bar set up inside some still-active foundry.

On the second compact disc the sounds lose power but gain in abstraction and conceptual depth: we move closer to that minimal electronic sound that made the duo famous. The atmosphere is anything but welcoming, and what prevails is a sense of sonic and mental "emptiness". Microsounds ("Konnat/Toads"), drones, dissonances ("Virtamuuntaja/Current-Transformer") and nods to Subotnick ("Altistus/Exposure"): the pulse is carried by crystalline electronic rhythms.

The third disc opens with the sound of water rushing in a toilet, almost as if the duo, having renounced the images evoked previously, meant to turn the page. This happens during the unfolding of the first track, through the emission of imperceptible atmospheric sounds that gradually become more audible and intense, until they suddenly release the heavy mass of pent-up energy. The atmosphere is desolate and desolating: the true protagonist of "Ilmenemismuoto/Appearanceform" is Silence. The frequent interludes present within the layers of this same track act as catalysts of tension: it seems that the escape from the unhealthy landscapes sketched out in the previous chapters must be paid for with a sense of emptiness and exhaustion. In all likelihood, we are facing the most intense moment in the entire Pan Sonic saga.

The echoing of the sonic elements that make up Vainio and Väisänen's design is eerily amplified, exactly as happens near the end of "2001: A Space Odyssey", when a crystal glass spins through the air only to fall inexorably to the ground. Everything is terribly immaculate and the sounds are perceived in every detail: drones of electronic frequencies left to their own devices, so that they fade into nothingness; sonic auroras that appear cold and majestic; sidereal hisses.

The fourth record resolves into a single, hour-long unicum, in which the pair carve out sinusoidal sounds repeated to infinity, without any break in continuity; the only variations introduced into this monolith of over sixty minutes concern secondary elements. The stasis created is chilling and defines paradisiacal atmospheres in which nothing happens, and what little stands out from the magma of "Säteily/Radiation" is destined to dissolve into the All.

Pan Sonic have always tried to derive their legitimacy from the "past/future" dichotomy, and with this work they have succeeded: Kesto (234.48.4), in fact, is the testament of an entire generation of musicians and, at the same time, a conscious programmatic statement about the future course of music.

Three years pass and, fundamentally, Katodivaihe isn't an album about which much can be said that hasn't already been said about its predecessors. It's a creature that clearly stems from Kesto, condensing into a single disc the first three of the colossal 2004 opus. No surprises, then, apart from an opening track that had hinted at another jaw-dropping listen: a cello on a Pan Sonic record! Curiously, the final result, on "Virta 1./Current 1.", can't help but bring to mind a darker Murcof. It's as if Vainio and Väisänen were telling us: "Hey, if we wanted to we could be like him, but we're not interested in such frivolities". Then again, Vainio's "Kantamoinen" (released under the name Ø) a couple of years earlier had already opened unexpected cracks of ethereal melodic hints.

All this, however, is just a false lead. The cello resurfaces only halfway through the record, on "Suhteellinen/Comparative", this time bare, before finally giving way to ever more intense noises and buzzing. From the second track onward, though, we're back in the duo's familiar synthetic depths, with their essential, minimal instrumentation. Tightly squared rhythms with a ragged sound, noises, morse codes, blasts that tear through the air for a few instants: "Lähetys/Transmission" takes us straight back to the first two discs of "Kesto", as does the relentlessness of "Hinaaja/Tugboat" and "Tykitys/Cannoning", or the pulsing of electric-electronic saws and synthetic buzzing on "Koneistaja/Machinist". Even the titles remain faithful to that electro-industrial imagery we know well, one that aptly foreshadows genuine sonic assaults.

Among them, one isolated case stands out as the most "terrorist" track: "Leikkuri/Cutter" is an even more radical two-minute drill, a sort of Pan Sonic meet Kid606.

At other times, instead, what takes over are tense moments of calm pregnant with sinister omens. The most unsettling/disturbing side of the two Finns' work emerges in the ambient-industrial thriller of "Kytkennät/Connections", made of dark, foreboding silences, or in the anxious interlude of "Hyönteisistä/About Insects", cinematic in its own way.

So, is everyone happy? Well, only partially. The sound and music of Pan Sonic no longer hold any surprises for their fans, given that every year sees the release of at least a couple of albums of collaborations or side projects, either from the duo together or from one of its two members (Vainio especially).

Katodivaihe is undoubtedly a good record, but it adds little to an already splendid (and already long) career. The fact remains that the two Finns are by now essential voices in the music of the last decade, and the fact remains that live they are a shocking, unmissable experience, but records like this one, however flawless and not without their own charm, add almost nothing to their story.

2010 arrives and, after recurring rumors, so does the duo's break-up. Each goes their own way, then, but not before putting their final work to tape.

Gravitoni thus arrives to close the circle, sealing it in the best possible way, definitively fixing on tape what has been, up to this point, the stylistic signature of the Pan Sonic sound, while at the same time returning to the very source of the duo's sound: if, on one hand, we witness the definitive crystallization of the minimalist impulses that made the Finnish duo's name famous, on the other hand we can only take note, with enthusiasm, of the vehemence with which the noise element returns to seal the final act signed by the Vainio-Väisänen tandem.

The record's aesthetic appears crystal clear, despite its multifaceted nature, right from the very first notes of "Voltos Bolt": a robotic hand-clap beat introduces industrial-like clangs that are interspersed with moments of pure stasis, over which a martial rhythm section intervenes, accompanied by subterranean broadsides. The universe depicted is of a singular greyness, with no room for any nuance, and "Wanyugo", though less vicious and angry, perhaps more sinister and gloomy, is there to remind us of just that.

There are no open spaces here; claustrophobia plays the wildcard of total fear in the vibrant blasts of “Corona,” surely one of the album's peaks. Blades that pierce the hearing from side to side insert themselves repeatedly into the track's granular structure, unsheathing an epic sonic fury and injecting pure poison into the listener's veins. Starting with “Radio Qurghonteppa” and the magmatic flow of “Trepanointi/ Trepanation,” though, something changes. No longer dry, razor-precise bursts, but spectral vignettes.

And among the stalagmites of that silent cavern known as “Väinämöisen Uni/ Väinämöinen Dreams,” the imperceptible vibrations of the mantle in “Hades,” or the scattering glitches of “Kaksoisvinokas / Twinaskew,” we arrive at “Pan Finale.” The Finnish duo's final act is something extraordinary. A synthesis of two decades spent as absolute protagonists of the global experimental scene, “Pan Finale” represents what Pan Sonic were, how they evolved, and the legacy they left behind: an ascending climax propped up by a velvety yet decisive beat, glitches woven into the structure, tonal variations and exquisitely fine textures leading to a perfectly measured explosion, and then back down again, toward isolationist abysses from which one final noise stab breaks through.

Overall, the experience that Gravitoni forces upon us is as all-encompassing as it is chilling: absolute in how it retraces and condenses into eleven compositions the weight of sixteen years devoted to a tireless search for the polymorphisms that define the very idea of experimentation, terrifying in its claustrophobic, suffocating progression. There is no room here for any loving, final peace: and this is perhaps the only seal that Pan Sonic could leave to posterity as testimony to their visionary and devastating minimalist aesthetic.

In 2014, Oksastus comes along to remind us that, as things currently stand, Pan Sonic no longer exist. Four years had already passed since the announcement of the hiatus, preceded only by the subcutaneous terrorism of Gravitoni, the pitch-black twilight of the gods, their final studio statement as a duo. This is a live document from five years earlier – in Kiev, Ukraine – in which, however, you won't hear a single breath from either the performers or the audience. Proof that, over time, Pan(a)sonic had worked their way toward something not even the most extreme avant-gardes dare explore: shedding the human element entirely, communicating in the language of non-sentient entities. Fifteen years of activity spent learning how not to make music, concealing beneath a layer of minimal beats a chasm of horror vacui that never closed back up. The Finnish duo's sonic manipulations, at this point, sound more than ever like a defibrillator applied to a dead body, noise exhalations that always collapse back into the most sterile, total silence.

It's the Cold War inside an anechoic chamber: with reason abolished, what remains are unidentified acoustic elements of crushing specific weight. Giving only tempo markings, as per free-impro tradition, means etching the ungraspable onto physical media: Pan Sonic evade the performance of existing pieces, remixing everything they are and have produced into a magma that has already cooled and is on the verge of self-destruction. It's the negative pole of “Exai,” the quadratic comeback of the brilliant Autechre, to which the Finnish brand responds with the most radical nihilism, of which, at most, you'll be left with a hum of static electricity.

Pan Sonic are no more, and yet Oksastus is. Reminding us that, perhaps, the war isn't over yet.

Two years later, the soundtrack for the documentary Atomin Paluu truly closes the circle on Vainio and Vaisanen's work as a duo. It can only be considered the last work in chronological order to a point, since the recordings span roughly seven years (2005-2011), with the final edit by Vainio's hand dated 2015. But the film's complex gestation was also caused by bureaucratic obstacles related to its subject matter, which documents up close the construction of a nuclear power plant in the Finnish town of Eurajoki.

The duo's devious, detached compositions could only suit this climate of palpable tension, given that their own earlier work had always spoken, in some way, of a grim and undesirable future, literally severed from human feeling and entrusted solely to the sterile, immutable expression of machines.

Seemingly derived from Matmos, meanwhile, is the specific processing of field recordings taken from the nuclear plant's construction site, amid rumbles, flare-ups and deafening drills that heighten the psychological aggression in the most maximalist moments of the abstract representation. This is, however, a fairly unobtrusive trait compared to the predominance of Pan Sonic's established stylistic hallmarks, steadfast in conveying an aesthetic of reduction that is in no hurry, nor does it prioritize, reaching the point of detonation.

The solo experience – Mika Vainio

Alongside his work as Pan Sonic, Mika Vainio produced, under various aliases, a series of solo works of the highest caliber. In 1997, the venerable Touch label released his debut, Onko, which shapes sonic landscapes quite different from those of the parent group. The four tracks that make up its skeleton unfold through drone-tinged shades that ripple into the incessant teeming of “Jos.” The massive “Onko Parts 1-11,” running 36 minutes, conjugates the ambient verb now shaping matter with enveloping gusts, now with glitches. The gorgeous opener “Kelvin” is a prelude to a circle that closes in the 16 spectral yet reassuring minutes of “Viher.”

While “Titanikin Juhlakanaatti” and “Untitled/20′ to 2000.October” — two tracks of around twenty minutes each — were released by Titanik and Raster-Noton around the turn of 1998-1999, 1999 also saw the release of Ydin, which confirms the path Vainio had taken. Here, compared to Pan Sonic's post-industrial outbursts, the ambient material (with the exception of the sonic abrasions of “Energia”) unfolds through a sinister, isolationist motion. There's no room for warm, enveloping veils; on the contrary, the Finnish artist stages silent military marches, slicing sound at an oblique angle. “Marras” softens the turmoil of an aerial bombardment, “F.B.” dies in its static coldness, “Vaihtuja” is antimatter groping aimlessly through the cosmos.

2000 saw the release, on Touch, of Kajo, an album that marks a fairly decisive turning point. The icy approach is set somewhat aside here. The nine tracks that make up the record reveal an unfamiliar side, from which ambient warmths emerge that used to get lost amid the frontal assaults of glitch. And so, even as it keeps sketching impenetrable, sinister backdrops, a clear sense arises of being in the presence of a decidedly more accessible work. The gothic whirl of “Leslie,” the spectral refractions of “Aleksandrovsk,” the stillness of “Aaltomuoto,” or the muffled clangs of war in “Osittain” sweep away the use of glitch in favor of an approach more interested in the evolution of sound in its purest sense.

And it's precisely the traits of Kajo, combined with a more substantial return of glitch, that underpin the gorgeous In The Land Of The Blind One-Eyed Is King. No longer ambient stasis, but matter that is continuously reshaped as it unfolds. “It Is Existing” plays on the evolution of dispersing celestial matter, amid gentle cosmic drones and vibrant dissonances, “Ahriman” raises an imperious wall that dissolves into teeming turmoil. But it's when he colors the drones with warm hues that Vainio strikes deepest, wrapping the melody in a dark, classically-tinged mantle (“Colour Of Plants”) or sketching the structures of a cathedral in the desert in the epic electronic climax of “Snowblind,” a veritable swarm of bees moving in gusts.

Surely the peak of Vainio's solo career, In The Land Of The Blind One-Eyed Is King captures the romantic, ethereal side of the Pan Sonic creature, conjugating it through currents that flow now placidly, now more forcefully, but never losing a path that fades into the most reassuring reaches of the cosmos.

In 2009 Vainio releases his sixth solo effort under his own given name, Black Telephone Of Matter. The poetics underlying this work lie in an intimate naturalism, as descriptive as perhaps never before in his multifaceted career as an electronic musician, even as it's forced to battle the chill of the digital medium and an uncompromising compositional technique. The sketch of "In A Frosted Lake", for example, couldn't be more descriptive, with glacial sounds realistic enough to evoke distant calls lost in the forests at the edge of a Nordic lake. The nature study of "Silencés Traverses Des Mondes Et Des Anges" is a concert of field recordings and cut-up, random pauses and industrial gashes.

His by-now-typical manipulation of natural sources takes charge on "Swedenborgia", built on click'n'beat, a kind of pictorial "frames", and warped resonances. The short-circuited musique concrete of "The Breather" is introduced by mysterious echoes and flanger effects, before finally being submerged by a fresh industrial avalanche.

In a more abstract vein, Vainio brushes in the pure ultrasounds of "A Measurement Of Excess Antenna Temperature At 4080 ML/S", ambient stripped to the bone with bands of random sound, and the pairing of "Roma A.D. 2727" and "Bury A Horses Head", two patchworks of radio works, rumbles and buzzes, gestural events and aleatory blocks.

The sophisticated compositional rigor manages even to mask the blazing irrationality of certain listening moments (at times painful to the eardrums, as in the case of the absolute frequencies of "Excess Antenna").

His sixth studio work was born in 2011. In Life (…It Eats You Up) the points of reference in play could be many, but Vainio has the ability to distill them into a raw, essential mix of industrial electronics, devoted to the most hammering, vibrant techno. Imagined post-catastrophic scenarios chase one another, in a kind of enormous pre-Apocalypse rave. In this final dance, bodies smeared with the unguents used to lubricate the machinery dance in an endless trance, while the music hammers on, in an endless delirium.

"Open Up And Bleed" is an industrial mantra of unheard-of beauty and power, with the rhythm section at full strength. "Crashed", despite its title, moves quietly through grey backdrops, while "And Give Us Our Daily Umiliation" is citationism cast in anything but biblical garb: harsh noise in plain sight, proceeding in violent waves.

But it's the two-odd minutes of "Throat" that truly unleash hell, amid metallic tumult and icy noise, along with the spectral initial spasms of "In Silence A Scream Takes A Hear", which stagnate and cast their pitch-black shadow onto towering walls: a tumult that suddenly raises its impact force. There's no respite: "Mining" and "Conquering The Solitude" are two more immersions into a world of the future. "A Ravenous Edge" closes out this bleak journey amid tortured screams and exhausting blasts of metal.

Mika Vainio paints deep chasms. His are portraits of cities from a post-atomic future, in which every human form is replaced by automatons. A city untouched by the sun, utterly without hope. The Matrix of the year 3000, an overflowing hallucination made music.

The other Vainio – ø

Alongside his work under the Pan Sonic name, starting in the 90s Vainio launches the solo project Ø: unlike Pan Sonic, here the predominant element is made up of minimal, binary rhythmic structures that are always in the foreground, emerging time and again from dark ambient textures and faint digital hisses.

Compared to the works made in tandem with Väisänen, the stripped-down noise element takes a back seat; the pivot around which most of Ø's elaborations revolve are cold minimal techno beats that repeat obsessively through a jungle of dark anxieties, submerged drones, and crackles of glitch music dropped straight down from the sidereal immensities that dwell in Vainio's own restless soul.

Ø's minimal techno can hardly be imagined as destined for Europe's avant-garde dancefloors: it's a magmatic flow of menacing electronic beats that, rather than being a joyful invitation to the listener's muscles, tickle and disorient their synapses, sketching labyrinthine patterns that repeat to the binary pulse of rhythms we might well identify as the offspring of an isolationist strain of techno music.

Released on Sähkö Recordings, the label owned by Vainio himself, Metri establishes right away the tracks along which Ø's aesthetic will run for much of the project's discography: the constant use of the same micro rhythmic sequence – in this case spelled out through a pair of bleeps repeated throughout the whole record – over which windows open onto content that is, by turns, more ambient or flirting with old-school noise dissonance. The manifesto of all this is the long suite represented by "Twin Bleebs", which stages the austere celebration of an overtly stated rhythmic minimalism that becomes a stylistic signature in its own right for Ø's poetics. The importance of the work, both aesthetically and within the historical economy of electronic minimalism, is confirmed by the considerable praise it has gathered among champions of contemporary minimal electronic avant-garde, to the point that one of the field's most interesting projects, Sleeparchive, would go on to confirm Metri's status as a landmark album for the evolution of this particular strand of sound.

Two years after Metri, Vainio releases the new effort under the Ø banner: Olento.

In this work Vainio focuses essentially on his own isolationist anxieties; the record in fact shows a pronounced common thread traceable to the predominance of ambient pads over the traditional rhythmic sequences.

Olento wouldn't be out of place in Pan Sonic's discography; it's a work that piles up disorienting, suspended futuristic scenarios ("Stratoostati") whose spleen perfectly mirrors some of the finest pages penned by Philip Dick, alongside noisy hisses that stand out over subdued beats ("Kaskaat"), arriving at the droning catharsis of the over nine minutes of "Tila".

In 1997, Ø's activity slows down: on one hand, Vainio releases Mikro Makro through the Raster-Noton label, the fruit of a collaboration with another hugely important name in the electronic avant-garde of those years, namely Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto, among other things the patron of Raster-Noton itself.

The work was conceived as an integral part of an installation designed to take place simultaneously in Germany, Finland and Poland, drawing inspiration from physical and astrophysical phenomena. Across these four tracks the two artists try to exhaust their minimalist obsessions: Vainio's tonal variations alternate with Noto's rhythmic geometries.

Also released that same year, under the solo name Ø, is Tulkinta, a work in which Vainio reissues his two debut EPs Kvantti and Röntgen, adding the EP Eetteri, which contains tracks dating back to 1993 and will later be reissued separately, again on Sahko, in 2005.

This collection stands as testimony of more historical than artistic value: thanks to these three EPs, it's possible to get a sense of the stylistic evolution Vainio underwent in the early '90s within the minimal techno framework, an evolution that led him to place his first stamp on the genre known as Metri.

The first part of the work is taken up by the EP Kvanntti, which is topped by the beautiful "Radium", four minutes in which the same minimal beat sets the pace over imperceptible micro tonal variations. Probably less interesting is the middle section of the collection, containing the EP Etteri, dominated by the six minutes of "Helium", built on a single minor pad interval from which emanates the repetition of a single ringing click. The closing section, dedicated to Röntgen, is good, opening with the enveloping bass of "Tukta" in perfect 80s electro body music style, followed by the usual distant clicks with their distinctly futurist aftertaste.

Between 1997 and 2001 there's a period of inactivity for Ø, which ends when our man returns to the music scene for a further collaboration with Noto: Wohltemperiert.

The album, released as always on Raster-Noton, contains material produced by the two during a winter stay in New York in 1998. Unlike Mikro Makro, here the atmosphere becomes more menacing, with the techno element pared down to the bare minimum in favour of a broader exploration of noise-driven oppressiveness.

But it's in 2005 that Ø truly gets back to work with a new release: Kantamoinen.

This album, which gathers material composed between 1999 and 2004, marks a break from Vainio's previous output, since the trait d'union that forcefully defines the work is that of a dreamlike ambient music onto which fleeting rhythmic segments are grafted. The essence of the whole work is distilled in the triptych "Kotiin", "Monneista Viimeinen" and "Aurinkokala", dominated by a murky, static mood marked by distinctly impressionist ambient chiaroscuro. This album sits awkwardly within the evolutionary line traced by Ø: on one hand it adds nothing new to the matter at hand – that of an ambient music with pronounced introspective traits – while at the same time lacking a unified, coherent poetics, underscoring once again how Vainio's showmanship as an artist can, in the long run, prove detrimental to the overall quality of his work.

The interlocutory phase of Kantamoinen closes in 2006 when Vainio decides to release a mini album under the name Ø: Aste.

The work, again released on Sahko Recordings, contains various material produced by Vainio in the early '90s. The eight tracks that make up Aste are the most markedly dancefloor-oriented material Ø has ever produced: hypnotic, enveloping minimal techno that can't help but rally the listener's muscles into motion. It's impossible to escape the rhythmic spiral of the triptych "Ionos", "Aaltovaihe" and "Sukeltav": the underlying mood of the compositions remains pitch black, but the obsessiveness and pinpoint precision with which the rhythmic patterns explode make this work particularly interesting for understanding the evolution of what would come to be defined as minimal techno. Worth noting is the lysergic synth line running through the whole of "Maan Valossa", interspersed with sound fragments taken from a speech given by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

The technoid frenzy that had characterised Aste fades in 2008 when Ø releases Oleva.

The work takes on the shape of a compendium of the path taken by Vainio thus far: Oleva gathers together all those tendencies traceable in Ø's sound up to this point, namely a deep dedication to the examination and representation of minimal rhythms, counterbalanced by a texture built from discreet ambient reverberations and fleeting distorted frequencies.

While the opening "Unien Holvit" seems to bring back memories of Kantamoinen's timid ambient watercolours, starting with the following "S-Bahn" we're back in the midst of the classic rhythmic developments Vainio has accustomed us to in the past. "Vastus" and "Mojave" are exemplary in encapsulating the ambivalence and polysemic implications of this work: where the clash between binary rhythms and particularly retro synth lines once again give us the idea of the desolate, desolating techno created by Vainio, the inner spaces of the latter tip the scales back the other way, leading us once more to the edges of an ambient music perpetually poised on the brink of annihilating metamorphosis, not unlike what an artist such as Deathprod has produced.

In early 2014, three years later, the Finnish artist unveils Konstellaatio, one of the most convincing and tangible works of the latter years of his career. The album carries the glacial void already masterfully depicted on Oleva straight out onto the Milky Way. There's nothing earthly left, no vital sign surging from the beats. Open space is thus reproduced in full, through a series of dark drones that trace out its most unknowable components: the triptych “Elamään Pu”-“Syvänteessä”-“Pukinjalkaisen” forms a climax in this regard, a progressive penetration into a darkness made first of unfathomable beats, then simply pushed to the brink of non-existence. If these aseptic pulses seem to brush against the void of the infinite cosmos, elsewhere the floating spaceship comes to rest on planets and stars: these correspond to the most concrete moments, like the cutting “Otava” and “Neutronit”, or the flash of light in “Syvidessä Kimallus”. What Vainio illustrates here is a mechanistic universe, pure substance with no predetermined design, proceeding by derivation and consequence of itself. There are no limits or boundaries, and it's all rendered with a technique almost opposite to the one recently adopted in his solo work, which prefers to make way for pulsations, vibrations and spontaneous, consequential tremors rather than pure calculation and experimentation. The distant music-box that closes the work on “Takaisin” seems, in the end, to glimpse a return to a primordial, purely instinctive life, without ever quite reaching it. An open ending for a masterful work.

Various collaborations

The collaborations undertaken by the two Finns are countless. Since it's impossible to sum them all up in a few lines, we'll limit ourselves to accounting for the most important ones, or at least those that left their mark on the duo's career. Of definite interest in this regard are the two albums made together with Alan Vega of Suicide. The partnership spanned almost a decade. Under the name Vainio Väisänen Vega, the three had released a strange LP, “Endless”, recorded in 1997 but released the following year. Strange, because it gave the distinct impression of a mere overlay. Vega did what he does best (or simply what he does) over already-recorded Pan Sonic tracks, and not their best ones at that. In short, it didn't feel like a genuine collaboration, but almost like a bastard-pop album ahead of its time. Placed at the opening, the title track wraps itself in a “Glory Glory Hallelujah” and the pairing of powerful rhythms and hums that has always been something of a trademark for the Finnish duo. A handful of notes and industrial rhythms paint desolate scenarios in which Vega moves with his usual great ease, the New York outcast letting his echo dig into the desolation. Such is the case with the oppressive “Desperate Nation”, among the most successful episodes.

“Sellin' My Monkeys” is one of those American urban nightmares that only Vega can tell, but which Rev can no longer render into substance: here Vainio and Väisänen prove to be excellent stand-ins.

Eccentric and bizarre, deep down, this old/new collaboration: if it doesn't always hit the mark, if at times the aim ends up out of focus, at least “Resurrection River” manages to catch you off guard in places where its predecessor was often largely predictable. “11:52 PM”, hard as it is to believe, boasts what, with a bit of goodwill, we might call a synth solo, and a blues cadence. “Chrome Z-Fighters 2003” is probably the poppiest thing the three of them ever put out. The closing “It's Violence” is almost a club track. A sinuous, mutant whistle, practically never heard before on a Pan Sonic record, accompanies “Black Crucifix” right to the end. The music on “Life” feels like a thriller from Dario Argento's glory days.

Sure, by the last track you arrive exhausted. The album doesn't fully reward the listener for its heaviness, but it can still offer more than one satisfaction, especially to those who already follow every transformation and side project of the three V's.

And while the collaborations with Land of the Rising Sun noise merchant Keiji Haino and with John Duncan yield few satisfactions, whether due to the repetitiveness of certain sounds or the sheer heaviness of the proposal, among the side projects — this time under the name Väisänen — one of definite interest is the one that sees him in the trio Angel. Behind the project stands the electronic intelligentsia of the 2000s: Dirk Dresselhaus of Schneider TM and Hildur Gudnadottir of Múm.

The four tracks making up Kalmukia, running just under an hour, follow one another with geometric harmony, proving to be remarkably well focused. The opening “Bones In The Sand” plays between drones, bursts of guitar and a cello tracing sinuous, quasi-neoclassical curves. Across the 19 minutes of “Kalmukia-The Discovery, Wiring, Invasion”, tepid gypsy reverberations are counterbalanced by the granular sound of sand rising as if lifted by the wind.

The tracks flow slowly, the air thick with the scent of the old, of a past advancing. Everything seems to be gradually covered by a thin blanket of time drawing nearer without any break in continuity. And so “Effect Of Discovery, Test, Alarm, Catastrophy”, in its electronic reverberations, traces the despair of the cosmic void opening up before one's eyes, a void built from solid drones and sinister effects pressing in obsessively. And then, at journey's end through unknown lands, come the reassurances of life's presence. The intoxicating flow of “Aftermath The Mutation”, somewhere between Windy & Carl, Black Tape For A Blue Girl and Charalambides, closes the circle in epic fashion.

A few months later comes Hedonism. This time, the advance of thin, grating filaments, rather than heightening the epic scale of drones and noise blasted to the max, only amplifies their shortcomings. It matters little at this point that a few tracks manage to salvage themselves from the chaos. Episodes like “Adrenaline Strike”, “Dropping The Ego” or “Unsymmetric Distance” aren't so much bad as they are completely out of focus, pointless. And even where we come across flashes that hint at their best (“Holding Loose”), the light goes out for good, with no appeal (“Highrise 1”).

Contributions by Nicola Minucci, Michele Saran, Paolo Sforza, Mattia Paneroni, Michele Palozzo

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