I didn't think I'd hear a scarier record than Kreng's L'autopsie Phénoménale De Dieu in 2009. But then came Mika Vainio's Black Telephone of Matter. Kreng sounds positively sweet by comparison. Vainio's tailored noise is deeply fissured, unforgivingly ambiguous, and almost entirely devoid of the kind of cues that help us read sound as music. He doesn't mix in any creepy strings or detuned pianos to humanize his compositions, and he locates more feeling in near-silence than high volume, which makes him distinct from harsh-noise mavens. Only a few sounds on the album-- some mangled bird calls, a scattering of cymbals, hints of deconstructed death-metal on "Swedenborgia"-- are mimetic. All else is seething, oozing electricity. It's a pitch-black world where blown-out machines mutter to each other.
As a member of Pan Sonic, a Finnish group that mines a ragged seam between minimal techno, industrial, and power electronics, Vainio (now based in Berlin) is no stranger to dire, confrontational music. Pan Sonic is known for blurring the line between the sonic and the physical. In 1995, they performed in a car park in London with a sound system rigged up on an armored car (designed by the KLF's Jimmy Cauty), similar to what riot squads use, in pursuit of the infamous brown note. One pre-Pan Sonic performance by Vainio found him locked in a room for ten hours with a low-frequency drone at 125 decibels. He's a process-guy with a bottomless fascination for how sound interacts with the whole body, not just the ears and mind.
Even in Vainio's various solo work (as Ø, Philus, and under his own name), there's usually at least the intimation of a beat, but Black Telephone of Matter is guided solely by extremes of frequency, volume, and stereo space. "Roma A.D. 2727" scans like a poltergeist radio, shuffling through piercingly textured machine noises that divulge moments of overwhelming force (spoiler alert: wait for what sounds like an infernal pipe organ). "Bury a Horse's Head" features pockets of laughter amongst its drones. The ghosting tones of "In a Frosted Lake" establish a subtle cadence with rate-of-decay parameters. The impossible shapes start and stop abruptly, yet their progression never feels desultory: Moving from one gripping passage to another by way of tapered segues or violent ruptures, every new development opens out inevitably, as in a really vivid nightmare.
It's hard to keep a grip on everyday rationality when the record is playing, as it's overwritten by Vainio's implacable script. This uncompromising dictation of reality is, of course, physical as well as emotional. Plenty of records favor headphones, but here, they're simply mandatory, unless you happen to have a very quiet room with a very good sound system. On "Silencés Traverses Des Mondes Et Des Anges", for instance, an important connective passage of juddering quietude simply vanishes without headphones. And it requires you to constantly adjust the volume, which you'll have jacked up during the quiet parts, unless you don't mind subjecting your ears to deliberately inhospitable frequencies as high volumes. "A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4080 ML/S" creates an uncanny effect by paring a tone so high you feel it more than hear it, as a sort of high-altitude pressure in the ear drums, with a soothing rumble that seems disproportionate to its anxious result. It's not too much to call Black Telephone of Matter a sadomasochistic record: In consenting to be mastered, we tap into a dreadful vitality.
