The Isolated Rhythms of Ukkonen

Artist: Ukkonen
Album: The Isolated Rhythms Of...
Label: Uncharted Audio
Release Date:
Where I Got It: It was the mnmlssgs crew who first alerted me to Ukkonen by posting a rather special ssg special (still available here it seems). From there, it was a no-brainer to pick up the first pressing direct from the label via bandcamp.
Packaging: Double LP in individually hand-painted sleeves. I didn't get one with the mysterious gold figure on it, but it's pretty cool nonetheless. The vinyl itself is white label to the point where you have to hold it to the light to see which side is which by the track names etchings.

Thoughts:

Meet Ukkonen, mysterious Finnish techno artist, which is where people start rolling their eyes because everyone likes getting a little mysterious. Whether they wear a lurid neon mouse mask, create an allegedly legitimate Twitter account that contains a single four year old tweet about Metal Gear Solid or construct elaborate mythologies of undersea realms, there are a myriad of electronic artists who prefer the shadows. This seems to allow a greater degree of sonic freedom and also potentially avoids the douchebag syndrome that arises when you can't separate an artist's jackassery from their music. Well, sometimes at least.

Of course, the other major advantage of the anonymity provided by obscurity is to let the music speak for itself, yet Ukkonen breaks the fourth wall on the back cover of his debut LP The Isolated Rhythms of...

"This music is influenced by the long train journeys I regularly made as a child... It is a cliche to represent an album as a journey but... this album represents physically travelling... I hope this album gives you the comfort of home but also the thrill of entering unknown territory."

Here he makes the album's central metaphor explicit, tying the general feel and even the individual sonic components of the music to childhood memories of Finnish railroad dreams. It reproduces the sensation of watching the scenery spool past, as if caught on an endless loop, before subtle changes begin creeping in. Before long, the patchwork of fields and distant blued mountains have been replaced by tall, cool forest with trees retreating in serried ranks to the horizon. You can't quite hear the click and huff of the train - nothing so blatant - but you can almost feel the world blur around you as the beat kicks in. This is nothing new in techno music, of course. Whether they looked to the motorways, the depths of interstellar space or the life aquatic, many early electronic artists with fascinated with the possibilities of speed and travel, with their music as the transportation. What makes Ukkonen's music special, like many of those who have gone before, is how vivid and arresting his travelogues are.

Most of these tracks span a whole side of vinyl, breaching the sixteen minute barrier and giving plenty of time to evolve, swathes of ambiance giving way to slow, languid pulses swallowing up the time and the miles, at times peaking into delirious crescendos (the middle section of "Tellervo") and at others dissolving into the softly passing night (just after that middle section of "Tellervo"). It's a difficult album to pick out individual components in, as so much of it shifts and morphs, long slow curves that bring you through the heavy green darkness of the forest and out into the dawn, where the sunrise-tinted world stretches below you and you catch your breath because you've never seen the world in quite this way before.

So yes, it's another romantic album: beautiful and strange and yes, mysterious. As much as I love the whole album, the second LP is my favourite containing its most eerie, unnatural track in "Humans, knew in the forest" which rides off-kilter over time signatures which seem to move in and out of true before resolving into moments of gorgeous clarity. "Seventy Three Days of Radiance" is long and dark and deep, where everything merges with the night and the world seems to unspool around you, arrowing through the blackness towards your destination with nothing to guide you except the sense of motion. As you travel, the details finally resolve around you, the shapes of fences and telephone poles and distant houses sharpening through the hazy blue twilight. You begin to recognise the outlines of the hills drawn in dark smears against the lightening sky and the silent sprawl of the suburbs. That's when you know you've reached your destination,
and the journey has finally guided you home.

Rating: A shooting star made of blue construction paper with a butterscotch wizard's hat drawn on the side by a child who spent the formative years of its life in the igloo of infinite reverb

You can stream it over on the uncharted audio bandcamp, if you want to take a tourist's eye view of the ride into the heart of Ukkonen's world but if you're lucky, there are still a handful of vinyl copies available so get on it while you can.

Bass Clef - Reeling Skullways

Artist: Bass Clef
Album: Reeling Skullways
Label: Punch Drunk
Release Date: April 2012
Where I Got It: Impulse buy from Juno. I mostly looked at it because it's on the still-awesome Punch Drunk label, but it was the snippets that sold me. I did originally confuse him with Ekoplekz and wondered why he'd cleaned up the noise so much. Some people say you should never judge an album by its snippets, but I'm glad I did.
Packaging: 2LP in a normal sleeve. Peverelist's Clunk Click Every Trip 12" is one of the best sounding records I own and I don't know if the same person mastered them or whatever, but this has the same sort of depth and clarity i.e. it sounds amazing.

Thoughts:
I find there's something deeply romantic about techno music. Not romantic in the Jennifer Aniston sense, but more in the proper, Byronic sense. From the starstruck escapism of Juan Atkins and the aquatic Afrofuturism of Drexciya to the desolate, chemical London of Burial's Untrue, the best techno is visionary and enveloping, taking the listener into alternate worlds (or, for something a little more obviously romantic, check out Carl Craig as 69's Desire, where the roseate glow of the keyboards seems to spill through the entire cosmos). These worlds live inside the listener's head as much as the artist's, visions inspired by the freedom and motion of machine music. Great electronic music takes you on a journey inside a single track.

Which leads me nicely into Bass Clef's Reeling Skullways, which opens (on the vinyl version, at least) with the track "Hackney - Chicago - Jupiter" which departs from his hometown, pays its respects to its roots in classic techno then heads off into interstellar space, waving at a whole other set of influences along the way. Its homemade kosmiche pulse gradually gets deeper and squelchier, the kick propelling banks of synthesizers out of the atmosphere where it catches the contrails of some electro-funk voyager out of Detroit and basks in the sun's rays. There's a palpable sense of motion, of watching new frontiers accelerate towards you from the horizon.

The side-long "Electricity Comes From Other Planets" is twistier and gnarlier, a journey more through inner space than outer space, riding the grain of the sound, dissecting the waveform to untangle fractal spatters of sound and render them in widescreen. Flip over to Side C and "A Rail is a Road and a Road is a River" is maybe, just maybe, the highlight on an album of impeccably realised tracks. Drifting into luminous view on the back of gaseous keyboards, it gradually assembles itself into an oscillating, bass-heavy groove that picks up cosmic detritus before the afterburners kick in and it resolves into something sleek, hurtling through the interstellar depths. None of this is necessarily making any new ground: the album's touchstones are undeniable but the way these tracks are assembled and the paths they travel make them as compelling and as vital as the music they reference. With the 'bass music' spectrum spending most of its time flailing around looking for interesting alleys to turn down, it's rare to hear something with such resolution and purpose.

It ends with the smeared drift of "Ghost Kicks in the Spiral" where solar flares of electro struggle to escape from the ambient hum of the stars, strewn like dust through the sky. The label on Side D states "made on machines by machines for machines" which leads me back to romanticism, but where the original romantics were awestruck by the beauty of nature, these techno romantics are smitten with the possibilities of machines. Listening to Reeling Skullways, it's as if the humans involved are just an accidental conduit for this music, machines finding a way to speak to each other across time and space. As if when Skynet awoke all it wanted to do was dance.

Rating: 628,749,421 (the approximate distance from Hackney to Chicago to Jupiter when Jupiter is at its closest).

Actress - R.I.P

Artist: Actress
Album: R.I.P
Label: Honest Jon's
Release Date: April 2012
Where I Got It: Purchased the instant it went up on Boomkat, in a moment of limited-pressing nerves. I even shelled out for tracked shipping. Panic ensued when it went on sale early at Honest Jon's and I had to wait.
Packaging: Nothing hugely special in the packaging, although the cover is kind of mysterious. It's pressed up nice on 2LP and sounds great like every Honest Jon's LP I've bought.

Thoughts:

A couple of years back (it feels longer, but time has a way of overwriting itself as you get older) I was writing (with @andrewryce, no less) for music onethirtybpm. We had a monthly column where we scarfed up 'future bass' singles and occasionally ventured into album reviews. When Splazsh was announced, I cajoled and quite probably even threatened Andrew to get my hands on it - Hazyville remains one of my favourite albums and I felt sure that what came next would be revelatory. The promo came at a time when the rising tide of white collar problems was drowning out the thrill of writing about new music. Overtime was clocking up and I was getting by on barely any sleep, coding all night and living attached to my iPod.

Into that void fell Splazsh and it quickly became my escape. When I put in my headphones and turned it up, I could fade the world to black and scuttle into the depths of its labyrinthine world. When I wrote about it originally, I said that when listening to it "passers-by turn into vague pencil sketches, scribbled outlines that recede into the mists, their faces reduced to monochrome crosshatch. The scenery becomes watercolor bleed, smears of colour soaking into paper before crumpling and blowing away like fallen leaves."

Yet in its wake, when I accepted there was room in my life for other music, I felt disillusioned. With music, since so much of it seemed like vaporware, dissolving into bitwise slurry during a single listen. Even more so with words: these clumsy, paltry things that now felt swollen and awkward in my hands. As hard as I tried, I couldn't nail down that feeling, that rush, that intoxication of barricading myself inside Splazsh, nestled in its dense, throbbing heart.

As it always does, music found its way back into my heart, particularly as I fell in thrall to the lure of vinyl. But words? I spurned them the way I'd turned my back on the god of my youth. I abandoned case and punctuation, shredded sentences into word salad and shied away from metaphor like it could

Yet here I am, two years later, taking the latest Actress album, R.I.P, out and placing it on the turntable, dropping the needle and sitting back to feel for handfuls of words again. I went back and forth for some time, trying to understand why I was doing this and the closest I can get is that I still want it to be a dialogue. Not with the creator of the art so much as the art itself. A sort of prayer, some way of parsing what music is and does for me. It may be through a glass darkly, but one day it could be face to face.

To the music itself then (how many paragraphs in is this? Score one for the corrupting influence of Pitchfork?): Splazsh always made me think of entropy and decay, the sound of some vast occult mechanism buried in a labyrinth under London slowly running down. In contrast, while R.I.P is as mysterious and aloof as its predecessor, it's lighter and more spacious, less earthbound. It's the sound of shadows and curved air. It feels like Splazsh has been dismantled, its mechanical frame torn away revealing the liquid, shimmering innards. Even a track like Marble Plexus, the closest approximation to techno on Side A, feels like it's lit from within.

It's Side B where the album really takes flight though, beginning with "Jardin" which sounds like nothing he's ever done before. It's fragile and almost painfully beautiful, built of glass shards and poison rain, darkness moving over the face of the water. From there, the album goes from strength to strength: there's the low-slung throb of "Shadow of Tartarus", the melody moving through it like a subterranean stream, and the glorious "Raven" which is like the shadow cast by the Model 500 mothership as it soars to the stars. And the best, for me, is the almighty "Caves of Paradise" built like a classic techno track but with second-hand organic parts. When I play it, it stops time and I want it to go forever. "N.E.W." is probably a close second, and right now the best way I can explain it is to say it's as beautiful as the second half of Before and After Science, these big cloudy chords that spiral and ascend until they break through the cloud cover and soar. It's not as reductive as a direct comparison to Eno would make it, because everything is filtered through that peculiarly Actress sensibility of obscurity and misdirection.

It's not that nobody else moves in this territory; parts of the album, especially the interstitial tracks such as the creaking, wooden tension of "Tree of Knowledge" are reminiscent of Svarte Greiner's Knive and there are other echoes of Wolfgang Voigt, Moritz von Oswald's M series and the ever-present spectres of Detroit, although only seen dimly through the rain under the light of the streetlamps. Yet it's the way Actress ties it all together, painting like Mondrian with his sliders and knobs, sculpting these sounds of shine and shadow, teaching his machines to creep in the night, to rise like the son of the morning and to inspire something akin to worship.

[/phew]

So, I love this. I'd like to recommend it to anyone, but I know most people don't like this sort of thing. It's abstract and odd and it feels like you have to sidle up to it to find your way inside. If you like music that's quite happy to exist out on the fringes and doesn't really give a fuck if you don't approach then it's worth giving this a try. At worst, you'll think it's a lot of noise and go back to something that orbits a planet closer to where you live. At best, you'll fall headlong and take refuge inside it from the world outside.

Rating: 5 stars. 10.0. Five big round vinyl records. BNM. #vurtrecommends. A needledrop style HARD 10. Whatever rating system you want to use, this sits at the top of it.