Sound Hunting: Sysivalo by Ø

“Does it annoy you that people today find electronic voices ugly?” Björk asks Mikä Vainio, hanging out in his studio in the 1997 BBC TV documentary Modern Minimalists. “It’s a pity that many people just cannot in a way relate with them,” ponders the Finnish musician. “Some of them are ugly for me as well, but quite many are interesting and beautiful as well.”

Much of Vainio’s work, including his recordings with Pan Sonic and as Ø, explores the tension between beauty and ugliness. Across his life and career there are many tantalising appeals to the power of the binary. “Mika Vainio was the most dualistic person of all. On one hand he had an extreme sense of beauty, and on the other, demonic shadows and death,” wrote his collaborator and countryman Tommi Grönlund in a tribute written for The Wire after Vainio’s sudden death in 2017.

The title of the new posthumous album Sysivalo, put together with the help of Vainio’s partner Rikke Lundgreen, fuses together Finnish words evoking darkness and light respectively. You can see the journey from one extreme to another in the Ø discography itself, which predated and outlasted his famous duo Pan Sonic with Ilpo Väisänen, spanning the tough analogue bleeps and tones of debut album Metri through to the spacious textures and atmospheres of this final project.

But Sysivalo doesn’t feel extreme. It’s intimate and yielding, and while there is nothing so crude as easter eggs concerning mortality or age, its meditative qualities invite reflection on Vainio’s unique career. Although Vainio and Pan Sonic are often lauded for their pioneering use of extreme volume and frequencies, which resonated in both dance music and sound art throughout the 21st century, Sysivalo tells other stories, too.

To start with the sounds themselves, Vainio’s palette changed extensively over the years. Pan Sonic explored the limits of old school analogue technology back in the 1990s, including gadgets built up or customised by their collaborator Jari Lehtinen. Over the years, Vainio’s live set up evolved to include samplers, digital effects and field recordings. Sysivalo now carries only traces of the deep low-end vibrations that were a Pan Sonic trademark, and is put together with airy, billowing sheets of sound across wide horizons that suggest the sensuous sheen of digital effects.

A fascinating paradox of Sysivalo is that an artist who was often uninterested in melody – focusing instead on microscopic details of sound – has created music of such grace and lyricism. The first quarter or so of the album – a tracklisting was hinted at in notes left by Vainio – is composed of several Etudes, short musical studies that were intended as the backbone of the album. An etude usually indicates a classical composer working out some trick of counterpoint or multi-part harmony. But in the hands of Vainio, these etudes are economical sketches with minimal brushstrokes which leave space for the imagination to fill. ‘Etude 4’ has a simple melodic refrain moving up and down the keyboard which hangs in the air, its return uncertain. ‘Etude 6’ has a knotty, quizzical line that repeats several times but always feels unresolved. ‘Kangastus’ has a hymn-like quality as if it’s an improvisation on an organ in a deserted cathedral. A unique kind of lyricism is conveyed by the way the music seems to pause and then move forward and sing with an almost corporeal sense of inhalation and exhalation.

Sysivalo transcends binaries of ugliness and beauty, or lightness versus dark. Instead, it glides elegantly from one to another, drawing out the tension between them and the way one can emerge from the other. The overall vibe is something like exhilaration or foreboding, a sense of knowing that something significant might be coming, without knowing exactly what or when. Like Alfred Hitchcock’s definition of suspense, the spectator has a sense of drama gestating just below the surface. There’s a faint echo of the video game soundtrack for the Resident Evil series, where an elusive cycle of repeating and hovering motifs leaves the listener in uneasy purgatory. Rather than light and dark, Sysivalo explores a million subtle gradations of shade.

There are moments of raw power, but they are typically felt from a distance. ‘T Bahn’ revolves around a hypnotic cluster of low-end impacts which have the elusive quality of music playing in another part of the building. ‘Aine’ evokes the same feeling of immense bodies quietly colliding as Porter Ricks’s ‘Biokinetics 2’.

It’s all a long way away from the ultra-minimal beginnings of Ø. Albums like Metri and Olento – names evoking abstract concepts such as metre, being, etc. (both recently reissued by the Sähkö label) – explored hypnotic repetition and variation, a little like the acidic mantras of Richie Hawtin’s early work as Plastikman. Sysivalo, though, is closer to the bleak, windswept sublime of Thomas Köner.

In Vainio’s conversation with Björk, she poses the idea that beauty might be a matter of close listening. “Sometimes inside the note, there is a whole microcosmos, especially with the textures,” she offers. Vainio nods: “That’s what I’m looking for.” Väisänen once described the shared passion that drove the creative partnership with Vainio as “sound-hunting … we didn’t have any grand manifesto … we just wanted to make music and share our musical universe with others.” In Vainio’s sound art, such as the self-explanatory 3 x Wall Clocks, he often simply let sounds be themselves, inviting the listener to disappear inside them.

Various philosophers of aesthetics have tried to articulate theories of ‘seeing in’, to try and encapsulate the feeling that art can draw us in and present a self-contained world, even while we’re aware that we’re still outside, looking in. All of Vainio’s work, from the raw electronic sound attack of his early days through to the ambivalent and ambiguous moods here, invites the listener to go inside sound itself, to feel it more deeply and connect as directly as possible with its energy.

The album finishes with ‘Loputon’, three minutes of carefully plotted tones with an elegaic quality, which nonetheless has some of the deepest bass vibrations you’ve ever heard placed quietly underneath. This closing track – the title means ‘Endless’ – would never have been intended as a final statement, but there is nonetheless a sense of closure. Listen closely, and you can hear everything in there.