Mika Vainio’s last album, ‘Life… It Eats You Up’ was a devastating work of sinister sonic brutality. ‘FE304 - Magnetite’ expands on the sonic territory, exploring more the quieter, minimal elements of its predecessor and revisiting some of the aural geology mapped out by Vainio while working with Ilpo Väisänen as Pan Sonic.
FE304 – Magnetite is also known as black iron oxide, and is a natural magnet. It’s an apt title given the way Vainio incorporates organic elements and warm analogue tones alongside harsher, digital sounds to forge his compelling soundscapes. ‘FE304 – Magnetite’, then, is richly textured, and on ‘Magnetia’, builds from soft, delicate sounds to a low, menacing hum with a serrated edge. Chiming sounds and spells of near silence contrast with barrelling surges of power electronics, and repeatedly throughout the course of the album, Vainio builds tension and then annihilates it in thunderous waves of sound.
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Shuddering shards of metallic treble grate and scrape to carve nighmarish soundscapes, while dense, distortion-tinged drones buffet through ‘Magnetosphere’. ‘Magnetosense’, on the other hand, confounds expectations by tapering lightly through a vaporous trail of ambience. It segues into the rumbling pulses and eerie quietness of ‘Magnetism’ that eventually gives way to menacing doom and industrial earthworks.
It’s only the final track, ‘Elvis’ TV Room’ that deviates from the ‘magnetic’ theme, and sonically, it stands apart, too. Tweets and flutters break the silence along with a collision of found material. And then there is nothing.
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