MIKA VAINIO レコード& CD

Notes: 260 page, full colour, hardback book full of previously unseen photographs from Mika Vainio's archive and the Vainio family scrapbook, plus contributions from his musical associates, friends and family, unseen texts, a full discography of everything Vainio ever released on his own and in collaboration with others and much much more - including a CD of previously unreleased material.

The book contains a heart-wrenching collection of photographs from the Vainio family archive, a broad range of artistic contributions (text, photographic and visual remembrances) from Mika's artist friends and collaborators, an Updated and exhaustive Mika discography, Jennifer Lucy Allen's unedited transcript for her The Wire magazine 2013 "Invisible Jukebox' - one of Mika's most animated media responses, a variety of Pansonic ephemera from Paul Smith's own Blast First archives, and an album length exclusive CD of previously unreleased Pansonic performance recordings - "Turku Moai - live on Rapa Nui"."

Review: Mika Vainio's "Olento" is one of the key albums from his fine discography and now, finally, it is available on vinyl for the first time. The sophomore album first landed in 1996 and laid down a new blueprint for minimal techno that has rarely been bettered since. The album is also a fine summation of the Finnish artist's sublime and singular style - icy ambient tundra that are vast in scale but minute in detail, warped synth oscillations that sound at once futuristic but also somehow like field recordings from a lonely part of the arctic circle, and brain melting sine waves that lock you in a trance. Essential.