Cassette
Finnish boy-wonder and Discreet Music affiliate Juho Toivonen wanders a little further from home with this latest tape release for Omaha's Grapefruit Records, giving wider reach to the distinctly homely decayed ambience he's been formulating for the past few years. The music of Taivaskanava lends itself well to cassette, half-eroded vignettes pieced together from lonesome piano keys, lo-fi folk-guitar, samples and ghostly static that seem to be falling apart as much as they come together. There's also a very human touch to Toivinen's approach, hiccuping drones, loops and glitches that trip over themselves in the brain fog of failing memory in a way that, in part, finds a purgatorial meeting point between The Caretaker and Monopoly Child Star Searchers. Labeling this ambient, hypnagogic, dream-state or time-dilated gets you nearly there but also misses out something key, an ineffable alien quietly that might simply be Toivionen's way of expressing himself in the world. If this is his voice, we're lucky he feels the need to share it.
