Indispensible 94-page Hardcover book and 2XCD limited edition focusing on Mika Vainio's intense and truly jawdropping work for installations and site-specific works - making for one of his most priceless collections of material complete with beautiful images and essays - do not miss! Raster Noton is never short of opulent hi-end concepts for sound and design, but they've truly excelled themselves with this book + 2xCD (one disc of unreleased material and a reissue of the amazing Ø + Alva Noto collaboration 'Mikro Makro') retrospective, documenting Mika Vainio's installation and performance works. Giving a literal form to his sonic functions, the exquisitely presented 94 page hardback book includes texts from Raster associate Daniel Klemm, pioneering computer musician and theorist Carl Michael Von Hausswolff and Italian writer/curator Daniela Cascella, who dissect and analyse Mika's work with due care and attention. The rest of the book presents photographs taken at the installations and performances where the compositions for the first CD 'Time Examined' originated. It's this collection that probably gives us the biggest thrill, granting access to some thirteen years of previously unreleased compositions that we would never hear without visiting the various exhibitions located in major art spaces around the world. These pieces originally accompanied a wide range of mediums, from Cindy Van Acker's contemporary dance choreography to 'Kernel' (2007), to Eva Teppé's extreme slow-motion video installation 'Omerta', each time adapting his versatile but unblinking sonic worldview to their site specific needs. Among the most brilliant of these is 'Berns', created for Lars Siltberg's 'Candleflames Modulated' (2007), exploring frequency extremities with visceral sheets of blackened noise, near infrasonic subbass and vastly unsettling use of psychoacoustic space. Equally, the intense detailing of 'Ilmanvaihto' leaves us breathless, and ironically so, as we're listening to a composition crafted from field recordings of various air vents around the Poble Nou industrial district of Barcelona.



The most expansive of these tracks is '4 x Radio', an 18 minute piece conceived in 1997 utilising custom-made mechanisms to manipulate three radios, together with recordings of an electric piano transmitted to a fourth radio. The result is a mesmerizing piece of minimalism among his very finest, relishing the sumptuous tone of each note from the electric piano and the alien possbilities of the radio dial, while clearly defining the relationship between silence and noise. 'Time Examined' is an invaluable document of sonic art, communicating from the periphery of sonic extremity with an aura of tempered melancholia and a meditative nature which is surely a blessing to experience. Do not miss. (Boomkat)