>CD – Touch
Multifaceted sound implementations, abstract and formally impeccable, arranged in unstable fractured sequences, congealed in rhythmic and granular turns. “Black Telephone Of Matter” is the fourth solo album by Mika Vainio, an experimenter mostly known for having founded Pan Sonic with Ilpo Vaisanen. The Finnish composer proves he’s just as detailed in organizing dystopian auditory compounds, putting together erratic and uncompromising passages, overlapping analog sounds and creating harsh digital conjunctions, hums, iterated drones and environmental interferences. No compromise appears to underlie such compositional strategies, a fact made vivid by well-defined waveforms, isolated and hybridized only by buzzes, dialectical oscillations and by a widespread dissemination of signals, whistles and structural noises. The listener is also confronted with crackles and static silences, which are multiplied by summing and alternating patterns. Even what little is left of natural and atmospheric features – the cawing of birds, the incoming rain, the barking of animals or thunder – is ambiguous; we do not know whether they are modified field recordings or wholly synthetic, resulting in the shining of an inorganic and immaterial light.