Abstract music will always be at a disadvantage compared to abstract art because of one thing: duration. It requires commitment and immersion, you can't sum it up at a glance, and when it stops it's gone until you go back to the start. Yet a record like this Finnish collaboration can have all the fascination, all the exploration of chaos and control and deep archetypal patterns of a Kandinsky painting or Hepworth bronze.
Jan Anderzén aka Tomutonttu is part of the hypermodern pyschedelic band Kemialliset Ystävät, while Sami Sänpäkkilä aka Es is the boss of Fonal Records and a respected film-maker. The title of the album is a play on a Finnish phrase suggesting something broken into a million pieces, and it is fitting. On these four tracks, fragments of sound swarm and accrue around drones and pulses to create endlessly shifting shapes and forms that emerge from the darkness, come close then dissipate or transform.
See the animated psychedelic cover art for Nääksää nää mun kyyneleet
It hints at the most ambient of 1970s German psychedelia, at the synthesiser soundtracks of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and at what might have happened if My Bloody Valentine had continued the dissolution of song structure that was going on in their Loveless album. At times, as in the very first seconds of the album, squirming blurts of sound make it a bracing listen à la noise artists like Astral Social Club; at others, particularly in the 11-minute final track, that dissolution and the sheer scale of the detail opens up a real sense of the sublime like a more benevolent version of Gas. But it's never dry – this is sound art that works on its own terms, neither making apologies for itself nor demanding academic engagement, but presenting its strange experience to be taken as you see fit.
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