Label: Touch Format: CD
More than just Pan(a)Sonic without the bass oscillations, Mika Vainio‘s second solo outing still bears obvious connections to his work with Ilpo Vaisanen on their last album release under that name as A , a recording which featured moments of unsettling stillness and texture among the distened beats and noise. Naturally, it’s also more about making a different kind of sound to Pan Sonic’s – wavering, exploratory, semi-consciously aware of the noises Vainio is mixing into the listening environment. Headphones are one thing, but putting Kajo among the hummings of fridge mechanisms, birdsong, passing cars and train horns is as vital as settling down for an intense listen in a darkened, soundproof room.
Turn it up loud, and some of the pieces here become truly unsettling, as wafts of electronic movement summon pre-linguistic eminences of the occasionally threatening kind. Like watching a dog settled in front of a TV documentary on the habits of wolves, there are moments when the human listener becomes alert to the sounds associated with raising hackles and before much warning is given, gooseflesh is everywhere. What dogs make of it is less obvious but they might not find it too relaxing either.
Circling drones, ratcheted trickles of noise, static in search of its own level and then up to eleven – there’s enough on this disc to provoke night sweats and nervous glances in the gloom, especially when it sounds like there’s something breathing, or more disturbingly, sniffing through the speakers. Development is a matter of awaiting the next visitation with apprehension, then revelling it its own definition of purity of any particular form. Somewhere along the way it takes transcendent steps into carefully-gleaned vibrations, shimmers in the distance and slow-pulsed hums, soothing without making the easy step into ambient mush, thanks to that underlying threat (perhaps intimation is a better term) of deeper modes of acoustic menace. An ultrasonic sine wave can do no physical harm, at least not on most home stereos it can’t – so let Mr Vainio into the fabric of any chosen environment, and maybe he can make it a little less linear, and that little bit more unfamiliar again.
-Freq1C-
