2025 Repress
Mika Vainio's second album, first released in '96, finally gets the first-time-vinyl treatment nearly three decades on. Either this doesn't sound 30 years old or I sound much older (maybe both!). The Vainio Hallmark Quota is charged full - dystopic, isolationist, icy, minimalist. All boxes ticked. All the good things. And yet, that doesn't quite cover everything that's happening here. The general critical narrative around Vainio's work tends towards understanding it in avant garde terms, which is true in the sense that it's often radical and progressive, though also somewhat limiting - scrawl those words across a record and for better or worse, you'll close doors for a few otherwise inquiring minds. Olento is very much in the clicks and cuts territory, then made alien with a chrome-polished Scandi precision, but it's also accessible too, swinging between a tech-y persistence, and its own ethereal machine-like grace that makes gestures towards a surprising music-box melodicism (has he ever sounded as pretty as on 'Tila', or as delicate as on slo-mo sub-dub of 'Itla'?). Vainio's vision is unique and specific, an eye-of-the-needle driven exercise in the economics of composition, but Olento is no purely cerebral exercise. 14 variations between short and long form that flex, stretch, pause and flicker. And that insistent pulse throughout? The machine has a heart.
FFO: Autechre, Universal Indicator, TRii, UEVPD, Raster: Noton
