About

Mika Vainio left an enormous impression on electronic music without reaching mass popularity. Even if you'd never heard his music before his untimely death at age 53 last week, you've almost certainly heard the artists who hold it dear, with people like Shifted, Objekt, Modeselektor and Optimo among them. Through decades of experimentation he always found ways to push electronic music to noisier, sometimes physically uncomfortable extremes. 

Vainio was so prolific from the '90s until his death that even most diehard fans might not have heard every one of his releases or know about every single project. Besides Pan Sonic and Ø, there was his early '80s noise project Gagarin Kombinaatii, the EBM-inspired Corporate 09, short-lived dance-leaning projects like Kentolevi and Philus, a group with Suicide's Alan Vega called Vainio / Väisänen / Vega, and collaborations with artists like Autechre's Sean Booth and Japanese noise master Keiji Haino. You could spend months poring over his discography and still not hear everything.

Across all these releases, there are common themes and motifs. A love of all things heavy, borrowing from metal and noise but shedding any macho posturing. An obsession with extreme frequencies, both high and low, tones could that pierce your ears or make your stomach rumble. A taste for surprisingly delicate, often eerie melodies that made his ambient work stand out. And a love of ferocious tidal waves of noise that only he (and Väisänen) could conjure up, a sonic signature that made for an instantly recognizable fireball of sound. — (via Resident Advisor)

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Aste was first issued in 2006, but derives from a pivotal era 1992-1993, following years of Mika throwing raves between Finland and Russia with the Hyperdelic House crew, where they mostly played imported 12”s picked up during trips to Berlin or London. Mika would effectively make his own tunes inspired by those 12”s, generating a string of foundational EPs (‘Röntgen’ & ‘Kvantti’) and the landmark album ‘Metri’, along with this pack of weird but deadly effective box bangers. Now on their 2nd wind, it’s not hard to hear the inspiration of Chi, Detroit and NYC on this phase of Mika’s music, which would never be properly reprised quite this way, but surely endured as the clearest prompt for minimal techno productions by Richie Hawtin or Roger Semsroth’s Sleeparchive over the subsequent decade.

Between the relatively straight played Detroit electro-techno pulse of ’Spiraalit’ and waltzing icicles of ‘Siimes’ Mika yokes his machines to a singular aesthetic, firming up a style of hands-on, shapeshifting  techno craft that would be often imitated but rarely bettered. Hallmarks of sounds to come are gauged in the deliquescent bass and ringing pulses of ’Sukeltava’, the bone-dry 909 clack of ‘Pakkasherra’, and with hints of his dare-to-differ approach on the warped ambient collage that gives way to fierce warehouse propulsion on ‘Kolmas’. Seeds of his steely bangers from 1994 as Panasonic with Ilpo Väisänen are felt in the hypnotic pulse of ‘Aaltovaihe’, and likewise for his increasingly spaced out Ø works that would result in his recent, posthumous, final album in the sublime weightless drift to ‘Maan Valossa’. — (via Boomkat)

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Out of print for almost twenty years until now, Mika Vainio’s Aste collection of early career material from 91/92 is finally back in our hands. Showcasing his most minimal of techno and ambient styles, these tracks range from mysterious and anticipatory speech sample led ambience to revolving, seesawing, jagged high speed stabs. Amid elastic experiments with subtle variations, and the elongated choral edits of ‘Kolmas’ swapped out for eerie high pitched plucks and low bass rumbles, ‘Ionos’ typifies the allure of minimal techno, barely more than some sine tones and a steady thud yet carrying a “less is more” vigor. — (via Bleep)

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Label: Sähkö Recordings
Format: 2 x Vinyl, LP, Album, Repress
Repressed: 2025 / Original Release: 2006
Genre: Electronic
Style: Minimal Techno, Experimental

File under: Electromoc // House / Electro / Techno
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