The Circle-helmed home of all things hairy and guitar-heavy, Ektro Records has recently taken on a synthetic hue, with key members of the core group of musicians from Pori in Finland (and beyond) picking up their drum machines and keyboards instead. Projects such as Dekathlon , Aavikko, Anachronist and (somewhat bizarrely), Steel Mammoth have released a number of eccentrically bloopy and bleepy electro rockouts both on the label itself — which they have straightfacedly dubbed the Synth Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal — and the dedicated spinoff Ruton Music, so perhaps it was only a matter of time before Jussi Lehtisalo joined the fray.
While he and fellow Circlist Mika Rättö have released several bizarre and manic synth-pop albums together over the years, including the deliciously inventive – and especially befuddling to non-Finnish speakers – Kopernikus Hortoilee Näkinkengässä and Ed Benttonin Briljantti Stabilismi Tai Taivaallinen Kylpysaippua, and Dead is angled not at the retro-(insert device or mood here)wave scene, proudly declaring itself to be other. So opener “Space (Part One)” can evoke emptiness and sparsity by the simple act of settling on a pulse and more or less leaving it be, the deadpan humour (or is that existential bleakness?) that characterises so much of Circle-related bands’ output comes to the fore in a blitting scuttle of snappy beats and ominous synth chords.
Jussi intones ominously in guttural, post-metal fashion, outlining some doubtless dread pronouncements before interjecting at the key moment “Grateful Dead… uh”, before repeating the band name to progressively more pungent “Uhs” and Ooohs”. Meanwhile, the backing sounds devolve into something that the eighties would have (barely) recognised as existing at the very fringes of electronic music of the era. This is of the kind mostly heard in dingy basements from Walthamstow to East Berlin, performed to a crowd of three or more, all of whom were themselves exponents of cassette culture and scrounging music from pawn-shop synthesizer remnants, and perhaps that scene is a touchstone for Jussi here; or maybe not. The rest of the album (Dead is of course available digitally and on tape) is largely composed of instrumentals that warble and reflex in repeated motifs and chord progressions that keep themselves as minimal as possible. It may take a certain sort of electronic music fan to endure this degree of almost entirely non-dancefloor friendly repetition. This is the kind of concentrated immersion into a loop and its occasional melodic fragments that most electronic music gear owners will recognise and appreciate to some degree or other, and it encapsulates perfectly the results of setting up a series of patches and letting them dictate where and when the music ends.Which is not to say that Dead is boring, nor that it ends up referencing (say) John Carpenter as such — it tends more towards the latter than the former, perhaps most on “Space (Part Two)”, more by implication than anything else. Instead, Jussi approaches electronic music as a system possessed of its own logic, one which when left to its own particularities extends far beyond the hedonistic technoid imperative (nothing here sounds like that particular form either). The music flows according to principles derived not from club-based entertainment or dance-oriented ecstasy, not even the booming 808 bass of the directionless post-trap, ultra-minimal groove of “Drums”, more from the never-ending computer game soundtracks of the 8-bit era.
This is music for machine-fetishists, for those who feel the tension inherent in letting the interplay of artificial drum and percussion analogues lead the way, the bombastic insertion of keyboard trills serving not a chemically-enhanced Terpsichorean purpose, but an almost provisionally blank slate for the listener to project their own extensions to the sounds on offer. A remix album would of course be both a ridiculous and perhaps entirely logical follow-up.-Antron S Meister-
