Mika Vainio, Flora Fishbach, Joanne Robertson… What are we listening to this week?

When Mika Vainio died in 2017 after falling into the Normandy sea at the absurd age of 53, he was in a state of grace. In full command of his esoteric machines, freed from Pansonic, the emblematic duo he formed with Ilpo Väisänen, the most crucial of Finnish "sound artists" (the term most closely apt for his practice split between squats, raves, and galleries) had just solved the equation to combine in pure harmony the different vectors of his music: minimal techno, musique concrète, spectral ambient, hammered industrial, synth pop, noise, and even dub—the deepest passion of the "King Tubby of the far north," which he never failed to display in broad daylight as soon as he was given the keys to the bar. Several albums released before his death, under his own name (Mannerlaatta) or the pseudonym Ø (Konstellaatio) bear witness to this meta genre, both radical and peaceful, subtly melodious, that the Finn had forged for himself, but we were unaware that there remained in the archives a final compendium in which he spread out in even more precise and refined contours.

Suffice to say that the discovery of this Sysivalo in the form of a swan song has the effect of a miracle. Compiled from