Mika Vainio ‎– Life ( ... It Eats You Up)

The guitar is such a familiar and ubiquitous instrument these days that most people would assume that there’s very little left texturally, tonally and musically to be extracted from it. Thank goodness, then, that there exist people like Finnish musician Mika Vainio, who would wholeheartedly disagree with that constraining assumption, instead appearing to think that the instrument’s spectrum is still very limited, and that there’s still plenty of uncharted territory to explore. Vainio does just that on his latest collection on Editions Mego, “Life (…It Eats You Up).

On the ten pieces here Vainio uses the guitar as his primary instrument of expression and the palette he utilises is appropriately expansive, delineating detail and texture with brushstrokes from the microscopically precise to the macroscopically broad. What he creates results in a distinct vision, imbued with clarity and purpose, and eminently descriptive. What appears superficially as abstract and uncontained is nevertheless informed of a precision and an attention to detail that underpins the manifesto that he’s attempting to express.

Let’s take just two examples to illustrate Vainio’s main premise. The opener, ‘In Silence a Scream takes Heart’, builds from the gentlest of micro-tonal premises, allowing the shimmering notes to wander a vast space but without losing themselves or their indentity, before bursting into a blistering cacophony fills that self-same space in its entirety. This is the singularity breaching its natural constraints, breaking the bonds of its own gravity, and is the seed that contains everything that’s to follow.

This includes duality, the presiding principle of this universe and the way it works – night and day, darkness and light, good and evil. ‘Mining’ exemplifies the concept, as it does its best to remind us that there’s another omnipresent duality surrounding us, indeed is an innate part of physical and material existence. Underneath the apparent chaos, on levels that are mostly hidden to our sensory perceptions, there’s a microscopic order engineered to keep everything working. This is expressed through the track’s percussive framework in combination with Vainio’s sonic abstraction, the metronomic rigidity underpinning all in this five minute piece. It’s telling us that there is no such thing as truly random chaos – in fact, the grandiose but nonetheless superficial appearance of the large events we witness succeeds only in blinding us to the concatenation of minutiae that actually comprise it, without which it would simply disintegrate and lose coherence. Indeed, within ‘Mining’ is embodied the notion of ‘order within chaos, chaos within order’, underlining that both are mutually dependent on the other and that, however much we rail against it, duality is inescapable.

Vainio’s work is by turns composed of another duality – that of small moments on the one hand, the ones that go to make up the framework of existence, with the larger forces that create the catastrophic and chaotic on the other. When stripped of any formalism, chaos is only order amplified beyond endurance, just as noise is only the quiet magnified in extremis. Vainio instinctively knows this, as is evidenced by his masterful handling of, and attention to, tone, texture and structure. I would venture to say that he’s a master storyteller, weaving complex yet coherent abstractions from untold numbers of threads. It wouldn’t stretch things too far to say that Vainio’s music works because of his understanding that in order to explain the complicated, one must use the simplest tools of all.

Many would aver that abstraction is the enemy of reason, of equilibrium and harmony, yet even in the most abstruse of abstract art there is an order, albeit often deliberately diffuse, informing it. The same very much applies to Mika Vainio’s work here – and that’s where its strength ultimately lies.

Rating: 4/5

Written by: by SMJ63

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