In 1994, on an album called Minimal Nation, Detroit’s Robert Hood stripped Motor City funk to its bones. Most of its tracks were made of little more than lithe, swinging drum programming and solitary synth patches that glistened like oil slicks; it’s generally considered the origin point for what came to be known as minimal techno. In February of the same year, more than 4,000 miles away, a taciturn young Finn named Mika Vainio took an even sharper scalpel to the same ideas. His debut album, Metri, couldn’t be more skeletal if it were a laboratory specimen. Where there are drum machines, they merely thump and hiss; his custom-built tone generators glisten like icicles and roar like buzz bombs. If Hood’s album represented minimal techno’s ground zero, Vainio’s was its ground Ø.

Vainio would go on to become best known as one half of Pan Sonic, a duo (with Ilpo Väisänen) that, from the early 1990s until its dissolution in 2009, waged a scorched-earth campaign against electronic music’s staid conventions. But it was Vainio’s Ø alias—after a symbol signifying absence in a number of contexts, from math and geometry to linguistics—that would be his longest-running project, evolving from those brutalist techno origins to encompass a wide array of electronic techniques and soundscapes.

Cola Manden

🥤
Hvem er det der prøver å stjæle min Cola?
Det ser ut som en mand!

Greenland ✦ Shark

Ja nøtter kan være godt!

Men dem sier det ikke alltid er sunt så pass på!