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 Before long, the patchwork of fields and distant blued mountains have been replaced by tall, cool forest with trees retreating in serried ranks to the horizon.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.