Landing soon!
The purview of Juho Toivonen further widens with this latest (I estimate sixth or seventh?) long-player, a piano-led two-parter of unexpectedly ecstatic purpose. Toivonen is an unusually prolific artist with a distinct predisposition for avant-minded, exploratory sounds that often point equally towards beauty and unease, employing a range of processes influenced by musique concréte, ambient sound and modern composition. Layering and texture is central to his overall aesthetic, which positions Kaksin has somewhat of a left turn into if not new than certainly different terrain - by comparison, this is assuredly a much more austere application. What we get here is mostly just Toivonen at the piano (while sometimes whistling a breezy melody), his pensive, chord-based performance accompanied occasionally only by Raimo Sinnemäki on trumpet, a contrasting union of free jazz energy and minimalist arrangement that builds slowly towards a rapturous release that never actually quite arrives. While both jazz and minimalism are obvious touchstones, what mostly defines Kaksin - and Toivonen as an artist on the whole - is an underlying sense of a post-punk ideology, post-punk in the sense of the open-minded, free-form sonic adventurism that defined Factory Benelux, Les Disques du Crepuscule or Crammed Discs’ Made to Measure series. Competing principles and approaches are being explored here in a way that adds up to a highly unique musical articulation - Toivonen has never really sounded exactly like this before, and yet it is unmistakably him. Hard to put a finger on exactly why that is - perhaps it’s a feeling, perhaps it’s a sensibility, perhaps it’s both things alongside the ossifying sense of an artist always at the perimeter of his understanding looking for new paths, outwards or in. In which case, that Kaksin sounds so ecstatic is no mere coincidence - this is the sound of an epiphany realised.
FFO: Benjamin Lew, Wim Mertens, Gavin Bryars, Lost Jockey
