Mika Vainio

https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/tommi-gronlund-of-sahko-recordings-remember-mika-vainio

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A month after his death, the Sähkö founder and friend recalls a musician who “created a language of his own”

i still have this horrible feeling like someone really close to me passed away

Anyone knows what was the cause of death?

T'was his birthday yesterday   Does anyone know exactly how we passed away? I heard it was an accident while vacationing in France.

edit: as Godwin just asked.

  On 5/15/2017 at 11:38 PM, Godwin Austen said:

Anyone knows what was the cause of death?

  On 5/16/2017 at 6:40 AM, kichiguy said:

T'was his birthday yesterday   Does anyone know exactly how we passed away? I heard it was an accident while vacationing in France.

 

edit: as Godwin just asked.

Based on unverified data, it seems he had dangerous tendencies for several years now. I don't know whose texts are these, the first screenshot is from another forum's similar thread back in April (by user "mego") http://forums.hipinion.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=106628

it can be hard being finnish

Why im not surprised? I mean, music without lyrics!

  On 9/4/2017 at 8:07 PM, xox said:

Why im not surprised? I mean, music without lyrics!

To be fair, if you look into lyrics of some of his known favourites, off the top - Suicide (they even collaborated), Hasil Adkins

That goes like this

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Come on baby, don't you be late

I want your head, I want it tonight

Cut your head of at half past eight

I'll have it on my wall about a half past ten

 

Yeah, come on baby, I want that head

Come on baby, I want that head

I want your head to hang on my wall tonight

Now honey, don't you be afraid

'Cause I'm gonna cut your head off

About a half past eight

 

Just like I said, I'm gonna cut your head off

And you can eat no more hot dogs

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha

Hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha

Or this

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Frankie is so desperate

He's gonna kill his wife and kids

Frankie's gonna kill his kid

Frankie picked up a gun

 

Pointed at the six month old in the crib

Oh Frankie

(scream)

Frankie looked at his wife

 

Shot her

(screams)

"Oh what have I done?"

Let's hear it for Frankie

 

Frankie Teardrop

Frankie put the gun to his head

(screams)

Frankie's dead

 

(screams)

 

Frankie's lying in hell

(screams)

 

We're all Frankies

We're all lying in hell

(screams)

It kinda makes sense, despite art and all

of course, i was being sarcastic, but yes, those lyrics... here he talks about a similar band called whitehouse. it's all about provocation, nothing else.

tho i was always somehow worried about him cause of his affect that's kind of distant and shallow... but it could be a normal variation, he seems like a normal guy

still sad about this. that new release brought me into a vainio phase. i sit in my room while a finnish blizzard rages outside

^^ Oh yes, thank you

Yeah I really love his work, discovered in my legendary swap mart vinyl crate I bought like 12 years ago (along with afx, autechre, soul slinger acetates, dj krush, lots of test pressings and deleted jungle stuff, etc.). It was Vakio sampler 10 inch. Some of the most blissful ultra-minimal stuff I'd ever heard.

Very sad that he has passed.

That Amoeba video is great, some of his fav lps sound really cool, definitely going to explore some of those composers.

Stumbled upon a long finnish post-mortem article on him with many personal stories in it just yesterday, I transferred one enthusiast's translation to readable format here in two parts:

https://telegra.ph/Mika-Vainio--A-Quiet-Life-part-1-08-03

https://telegra.ph/Mika-Vainio--A-Quiet-Life-part-2-08-03 

Finnish original: https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2017/12/18/mika-vainio-a-quiet-life

Some excertps in regards to his tracks:

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These observations are also audible in his music. For instance, the famous track Twin Bleebs from Metri (1994) was born when he was lying in his bed late at night, listening to the beeping of traffic lights in a nearby intersection, phasing in and out of sync.

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Part of the gear was bought by Pan Sonic themselves, some of it was custom-built by Jari Lehtinen. He designed some amazingly imaginative equipment: a swallowable microphone, an instrument with such a powerful sound that statues shattered at an art museum where Pan Sonic played. Another piece of gear by Lehtinen caused a bomb alert at airport customs when the band was returning from abroad. Mika had to play it for them to prove that it was a genuine musical instrument.

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Even though that search took time and effort, the music needed to take us - it wasn't easy to fit together this enormous fuss and that state of flow. We devoted almost all our days to this combination, from 11 in the morning till 6 at night.

This routine and pragmatism was specifically Mika's wish. The fact is that most of the sounds we could get were awful crap. You don't get the good sounds without long hours.

Electronic gigs might look and even sound like the musicians are just standing around pressing buttons, but we trained many weeks for one gig. We couldn't read music, but we made meticulous notes on how to find the right sounds in a live situation and when we would improvise.

At first we were hated. When Pan Sonic played Färgfabriken in Stockholm, people called the police on us. The reason was that we didn't play rhythmic music. People wanted their 4/4 easily danceable techno. In Berlin, someone in the audience poured beer all over my equipment.

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It was only in the early 2000's that we really broke through and people started to understand what our music was all about. Without that belief in our own art we would've quit many times over. There was absolutely no money in it. We were never financially well off, although the glowing words of the music press might have led you to believe otherwise.

I marvel at the fact I'm still alive. I live in Kuopio now. Making a living as an experimental musician in that town these days means that you need to do gigs for next to nothing, bring your own equipment and be rewarded with all kinds of pissing and moaning. But I'll go on. It's what Mika would have done.

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Me and Mika's favorite record in our oeuvre is Kulma (1996). The opener Teurastamo was born from Mika's memories of working in the slaughterhouse in Turku. After a torturous search he'd found a noise in his machine that sounded like a screaming pig.

Kulma is our most brutal album, it hits you like a stern whip across the back of thehead. Despite the poor sound quality it's our most direct and uncompromising work.

The names of our songs were often born when Mika made a good meal and put on some Brian Eno. Then we would smoke and look for good-sounding words in dictionaries.

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His way of translating his experiences to music was wonderful. I remember when he saw Terence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011). He loved the soundtrack so much that he went to see the movie again, blindfolded. So he went in just to listen to the movie. Inspired by this experience, he - as far as I know - composed Elämän puu.

The cover images of Life (...It Eats You Up) (2011) were shot as a result of an awful chain of events. Mika had a habit of slicing up an apple with a knife and eating the slices one by one by taking them up to his mouth between a finger and the blade. He was eating an apple like this while drunk and managed to cut open his tongue. To stop the bleeding, he stuffed a toilet paper roll into his mouth and passed out on the mattress.

At some point he had woken up, gone to get help and taken pictures of the bloody disaster before the ambulance came.

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How can music this good come out of Finland? This was my first reaction - or more like an exclamation - when I head Mika Vainio's music for the first time. I was listening to his first two EPs, published by Tommi Grönlund's Sähkö Recordings in 1993. I'm not the only one to react in this way.

When Grönlund went to sell Mika's first EPs to Hard Wax in Berlin, they played them in the store to test them out. Everybody stopped looking through records and talking. It's very rare for the clientele to fall silent like that on account of the background music. There was a silencing magic in Mika's music. People who were in the store at the time have said that they were witnessing the start of a new era in electronic music.

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I remember a short conversation I had with Mika about his music. It was pretty much this:

- Why can't you make the kind of music Darude makes?

- Because it's not my business.

After saying that, he smiled. I appreciated his music, but I knew he could have made hit melodies if he had wanted. He was quite bitter with me for saying these thing.

I wondered why he wouldn't make music like Darude, because it would've solved many financial woes. In my youth, a composer would have starved making this kind of music. We didn't have world-wide channels and information exchange then.

It was only after Mika had died did I start to understand how much it meant to so many people around the world. I had never seen it before.

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There is an autobiographical element to Mika's music. I once told him a story from my childhood where I was fishing at a lake and caught a catfish. I pulled the fish so close that we were eye to eye. Then the line broke and the catfish got away.

The story ended up on the Kantamoinen album with the name Monneista viimeinen (The Last of the Catfish). Mika's childhood favorite book Vellamon lapset (Children of Vellamo) was an inspiration both in cover art and in the names of the songs on Heijastuva (2011).

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thx for the thread bump & the translations, interesting read... was just playing 'in the land of the blind' earlier today, which was the first album of his i heard (even before getting into pan/a/sonic) and is still an all-time favourite

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKtI6DyKnYmOFbFcZ0suj0_SLCs9a7UtW

coming up on four years without Mika. sad. a true artist, clearly with some issues. Was listening to Kesto the other day and wow is Rahina I a fantastic opener. A beautiful embodiment of a blackout argument with ones own demons. on a miserably cold night in finland. at least that's how i interpret it lol

just found out there's a book about mika:

https://www.normanrecords.com/records/176562-mika-vainio-mtv-150563-12042017

superpang posted a 2GB .wav on socials

https://mastodon.social/@superpang/112260580943213561

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xwpyxlKVQT3tGLSsawwXg0s4oXlCkCjt/view?usp=share_link

Thanks for the download link. I don't know a huge amount of his discography (other than some of his more minimal Ø stuff) so does anyone know what the 3 and a half hours are actually made of ? (a best-of, unreleased tracks, a mix set made by Mika of him and/or other artists ?)

  On 8/3/2020 at 7:55 PM, Amen Lare said:

Stumbled upon a long finnish post-mortem article on him with many personal stories in it just yesterday, I transferred one enthusiast's translation to readable format here in two parts:

https://telegra.ph/Mika-Vainio--A-Quiet-Life-part-1-08-03

https://telegra.ph/Mika-Vainio--A-Quiet-Life-part-2-08-03 

Finnish original: https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2017/12/18/mika-vainio-a-quiet-life

Some excertps in regards to his tracks:

 

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Was listening to a lot of Mika’s and Panasonic music lately and i realized that im still struggling with his departure! I somehow remembered that someone posted these tales about him here and im really happy to found them! Reading them again, more peacefully this time but still with some underlying sorrow. Rip Mika!

For those that haven't seen it, Vainio during better times. Great mini doc/film: