Futureproofing #4: Then & Now: The techno origins of Mika Vainio

A look at the Finnish legend's upcoming posthumous material and a rundown of some of his earliest, often forgotten goodies.

It wouldn't be a stretch to call Mika Vainio one of my favorite artists of all time. I'm not alone here: a small cottage industry has sprung up around the Finnish musician's work since his untimely death in 2017, encompassing books, films, endless live albums and archival series. (The world of experimental electronic music is larger than you think.) Of course, it's also because Vainio's work touches on so many things at once: techno, metal, drum & bass, dubstep, sound art, all with an attitude that mixes punk bravado with drunken Nordic swashbuckling.

Shortly after Vainio died, I wrote an obituary feature running through some of the essentials of his discography. It's a good place to start if you aren't familiar. But the latest morsel of Vainio brilliance is this new 12-inch for his longtime label (and Finnish experimental institution) Sähkö, and it also rewards newcomers. This one precedes the release of a new Vainio studio album put together from his final recordings by his then-partner Rikke Lundgreen, which should be out sometime early next year. (She's a project manager at Oslo's Nasjonal Museet—highly recommended if you find yourself in the Norwegian capital.)

Fermionit is an oddball: an extended version of a compilation-only track and two edits of another composition whose original has yet to see the light of day. But it invites us to examine the considerable impact Vainio, and especially his Pan Sonic project, has had on today's electronic music, a point that feels keener than ever in 2024.

"Fermionit" first appeared on a box set from Belgian label De:tuned in 2016 less than six months before Vainio's death. It's tempting to read it as a hint towards a new direction, although as usual with Vainio, it's a lateral rather than drastic shift. Imagine 2014's Kilo hollowed out, made of glass instead of brimstone, and pretty in a way Vainio rarely allowed his work to be. The intro could be the startup sound of an '00s operating system, and the chimes paint an eerie melody in an alien cadence, never quite cohering into something catchy or logical.

Maybe it's because they're often in Finnish, or just scientific jargon, but English-speaking people rarely pay attention to Vainio's titles. They should. "Fermionit," for example, is instructional. Fermions are particles like electrons and neutrons that, by definition, cannot exist in more than one quantum state at once. I know that sounds meaningless, but it makes sense: each note sounds like it's avoiding the next, afraid to make a chord, plucking out sounds at random ends of the scale far away from the previous one. The effect is otherworldly and unusually transportive, painting a wide open space rather than the usual cresting waves of sound. It pulls you in instead of pushing you away

."Kulmamomentti," on the flipside, means "angular momentum." It's the type of motion that powers everything from hurricanes to bicycle wheels, which also feels self-explanatory, at least judging from the two edits here. Jimi Tenor's version sounds almost funky, with a groove (and a single sustain note) played backwards, buffeted by more icy bell sounds and eerie vocals, while Kaukolempi slows it down. It's hard to judge these edits without hearing the original—and neither has the magnetic pull of "Fermionit"—but the tightly-staggered womp of both makes them catnip for any producer in the ongoing dubstep revival.

You know what else sounds surprisingly contemporary? The brutal, ugly kick drums of Vainio's first, self-titled Pan(a)sonic EP. This band, whose name eventually changed to Pan Sonic, was Vainio's lifetime project with Ilpo Vaisainen. The duo perfected what I've often described as "the sound of electricity itself," but early on, they were more aligned with techno, maybe even hard house, than they'd probably like to admit. And the EP will probably stun any casual listener of the duo. "Muuntaja" ("Transformer"), with its Thunderdome-ready kick drum, all lead-footed and distorted, chased by the usual electrical sounds. Over the course of ten minutes it becomes an abstract barnstormer, with Reese basslines, 808 woodblocks and the kind of high-pitched, ear-splitting notes that would become a trademark of later techno projects like Planetary Assault Systems or, later, Shifted.

Vainio and Pan Sonic have always been best at live shows, which makes even brutal tracks like "Muuntaja" interesting over a ten minute runtime. The flipside, "Murtaja"—this time, "burglar" or "hacker"—offers a bridge towards later Pan Sonic records, with a broken kick drum pattern and behind-the-beat percussion that sounds like stucco being knocked off a false ceiling with each thrust. Things get dubbier, and more volatile, across the track, but Vainio and Vaisainen never lose sight of that diabolical kick drum, chasing the dragon in a far more direct way than they ever would again. Hard techno fans, take note: this shit was brutal in 1994, and it wasn’t even called gabber.

If you look even further back, to the '80s, you'll find Gagarin Kombinaatti, an early '80s band Vainio started with three of his friends. Sähkö released a compilation of the band's work on their Puu imprint in 2015, and offers a valuable glimpse into the origins of Vainio's sound: early industrial, like Throbbing Gristle short-circuiting. The reissue was greeted as something as a lost classic, though I'd wager that value is primarily for completists. 83-85 is illuminating but not mind-blowing. For a stronger project from Vainio's early days, let me direct you to Corporate 09. 

Corporate 09 was a project started by fellow Finn Pertti Grönholm that featured Mika Vainio in its earliest incarnation, the lineup that released the rather underrated, if not completely original, debut album Mindprobe. Here, Vainio and Grönholm flesh out a sound somewhere between Detroit techno and snarling, knife-edged EBM—it's not all that far removed from Jeff Mills's first album, Deep Into The Cut, as part of a band called Final Cut in 1989. The record is billed as "the first Finnish techno / techno house album," and while that's hard to verify, this 1991 release is definitely up there.

The album is a must-listen for any fan of flamboyant, early '90s techno and industrial, the kind with paranoid vocal samples and primitively manipulated images of faces of and technology. But even more interesting—and honestly, better—is a new(ish) demo collection released last year that I was only made aware of recently. Skeletron - Tracks and Traces 1990​-​1991 collects a handful of Mindprobe demos and, crucially, also adds tunes from before the album presenting a rawer, more DIY version of the group when they were still finding themselves. This is the real good shit, lacking the polish of Mindprobe and with a certain sonic volatility that would become a Vainio trademark.

"Terratrigger" has a delightfully ugly bassline and rancid 303s, hinting at Vainio's enduring interest in acid—even if eventually he would transform it into something even uglier, unrecognizable—while Vortex has telltale Vainio tones, like the rising synths that start buzzing like bees in a jar, over a rudimentary techno beat whose stiff drum machine sounds lay the blueprint for the remarkably un-funky experiments in rhythm that would define Vainio's '90s work.

Among those '90s records is his debut solo album under the name Ø, which is due for a reissue soon on Sähkö. Metri ("meter"), a dense double-LP,  functions like a convenient sampler of all the directions Vainio would eventually go in. That includes a sexier, streamlined version of "Muuntaja" and the disorienting "Twin Bleebs," whose hard-panned, microtonal chimes sound bit like if the creepier parts of Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2 went clubbing, the kick drum dutifully kicking along underneath. 

Here we can already see Vainio's conflicting relationship with techno: he could make it in his sleep, and make it well, as so much of Metri—and other solo records—make clear. But he also sounded kind of bored with that. Why else would he add a whole disc of sound art experiments to Metri, a record that, conceivably, could have been of crossover interest a la Tri Repetae when it came out in the mid-'90s? And sure enough, tracks like "Kenttä" ("field)" and "Dayak" are among the quietest and weirdest in Vainio's catalogue, predicting the near-ambient rumbles that would make him a regular in Europe's avant-garde-industrial-complex late in his career. But in these earlier experiments you can hear his pure love for sound: he loves the sound of a single low note droning and just slightly varying for seven minutes, and he's going to make you love it, too.

In this particularly fertile period from 1994 to 1997, when he wasn't putting out Ø records and establishing the Pan Sonic sound alarmingly quickly, he was putting out a string of techno 12-inches under various names. Philus is probably the most famous, and I've written about it and Kentolevi already, but here I'd like to draw attention to Tekonivel and the 1994 Reuma EP, released on Abe Duque's Tension Records around the same time Metri was coming out on Sähkö. 

The alias means "artificial joint" and the title refers to rheumatoid arthritis, and the four tracks contained within are as mechanistic and unforgiving as you might hope from that particular combo. The title track is a highlight, sounding like peak-period Luke Slater before he even got there—it's an electromagnetic storm of kick drums and orbiting acid lines, only growing in power until it's a churning beast. For those who only know Vainio's critically acclaimed later work, I bet you didn't know he could make techno like this. And while plenty of his work has been dance floor adjacent, few of those records are as straightforward as what he was pumping out in this time period.

Other highlights include Kentolevi's Keimola EP (1996),  Philus's pH EP (1993), his 1996 collaboration with Jimi Tenor as Kosmos, the goofily named Orchestra Guacamole with JS16 (another prolific Finn)  I'll plug my Remembering Mika Vainio article one more time, because it gives you a good place to start with some of his most important records. And then I'll leave you with something you probably didn't know, no matter how Sähköpilled you are: Vainio was part of a retro and gloriously cheesy rock band in the late '90s called Hardcore Superstar. The music isn't exactly good, and he was only part of the band for one album cycle, but behold: Mika Vainio as Dyna Mike the drummer in a band that had a song called "Bubblecum Ride." Was there anything he couldn't do?