: Sysivalo

"In 1994, on an album called Minimal Nation, Detroit's Robert Hood stripped Motor City funk to its bones. Most of its tracks were made of little more than lithe, swinging drum programming and solitary synth patches that glistened like oil slicks; it's generally considered the origin point for what came to be known as minimal techno. In February of the same year, more than 4,000 miles away, a taciturn young Finn named Mika Vainio took an even sharper scalpel to the same ideas."

"His debut album, Metri, couldn't be more skeletal if it were a laboratory specimen. Where there are drum machines, they merely thump and hiss; his custom-built tone generators glisten like icicles and roar like buzz bombs. If Hood's album represented minimal techno's ground zero, Vainio's was its ground Ø. Vainio would go on to become best known as one half of Pan Sonic, a duo (with Ilpo Väisänen) that,"

Mika Vainio pursued an enduring interest in capturing the vastness of sound, producing pieces that are both atmospheric and tactile. In 1994 Robert Hood's Minimal Nation exemplified stripped-down minimal techno; Vainio's debut Metri pushed that minimalism further, favoring thumping, hissing drums and custom-built tone generators that glistened and roared. Vainio became widely known as one half of Pan Sonic, a duo that challenged electronic music conventions. The Ø alias—invoking absence—became a long-running project that expanded from brutalist techno into diverse electronic techniques and soundscapes. Vainio released eight Ø albums until his 2017 death and had been working on a ninth for three years. Tommi Grönlund and Rikke Lundgreen compiled the material into Sys

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