Terror inducing atmospherics aside, Magnetite is a marvelous snarling visceral work. Fans of fearful heavy drone plus Tim Hecker, Keith Fullerton Whitman and Ryoji Ikeda style sound art experiments will be enthralled.
[Release page] Music comes in many forms. It can waft past your ears without a care in the world, barely tickling your eardrums with interest. It can be too saccharine, too twee, too irritating—syrup-ing around your aural canals like a petulant teenager. It can be beautiful, uplift, bring people together and all that self help guff. It can also challenge, terrify and confuse—just some of the territories this latest release from Mika Vainio inhabits. Testing the outer reaches of both silence and noise, Vainio explores each with exacting detail—magnifying their claustrophobic qualities with sound sources culled from sine wave generators and radio signals.
Things start quiet with a reverb drenched woodblock tap before a sudden wall of distorted noise hammers the auditory cortex with a brutal ferocity and sound so present it’s right up in your face nudging your eyeballs. Lulls crop up throughout—bestowing a false sense of security as metallic reverberations and gentler audio manipulations form moments of beauty. Before you know it, further heavy duty distortion hoovers the wax from the lower reaches of your lug holes and squirts it all over the walls leaving you staring wide-eyed at the speakers trying to work out what just hit you.
It feels like Vainio is plugged directly into my apartment’s electrical system, conjuring up static demons—blasting them through the ether and dispersing the terrified air with blackened sound waves. At times it appears there are human voices trapped within the racket—desperate screams attempting to exit the merry hell spewing forth.
Terror inducing atmospherics aside, Magnetite is a marvelous snarling visceral work. Fans of fearful heavy drone plus Tim Hecker, Keith Fullerton Whitman and Ryoji Ikeda style sound art experiments will be enthralled.
Magnetite is available on Touch. [Release page]
[itunes id=”550055563″]
