The Letter They Lost to a Lawyer: How Sähkö Built a Sound Out of Subtraction

In February 1999 a Finnish duo released an album called A. It reads like a concept title. It is closer to an inventory. The year before, lawyers acting for Panasonic in the United States had written to Blast First, the Mute offshoot that handled the group outside Finland, and the band that had spent five years calling itself Panasonic became Pan Sonic. The album was named after the letter they had been made to give up.

It is a better story once you know that taking things away was already the house method.

A label that began as a made-up name

Sähkö Recordings was founded in 1993 by Tommi Grönlund and Mika Vainio. Sähkö is Finnish for electricity. The two had met in Turku in the mid 1980s, inside a small circle of teenagers who collected films, books, magazines and records from wherever they could reach, and by the end of the decade they were running acid house parties as part of the Hyperdelic Housers crew, active in the city from roughly 1989 to 1993.

Grönlund, an architect by training, was not trying to build a record company. He wanted Vainio’s music to exist on vinyl, and the name was invented for the occasion with no plan behind it. When the first two records were received well, the placeholder turned into a job that lasted twenty five years.

Instruments that had to be built before they could be played

Pan Sonic came together in the summer of 1993 around Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen, both born in 1963. Sami Salo joined in 1994 and left in 1996. What survived was a duo working with hardware that did not exist until a friend made it.

Their unofficial third member was Jari Lehtinen, who built their instruments: one large box carrying twelve oscillators that could be patched and modulated into each other, a small synthesiser fitted inside an old typewriter they called the Complex Sound Generator, a roughly six metre infrasonic tube, and a Roland 808 for rhythm. Vainio was open about not knowing much about computers or MIDI sequencing, and about not wanting to. He was interested in frequencies as physical events, sounds you register in the chest before the ear files them.

The live presentation matched. Blue light, two men behind their gear adjusting levels, and one white oscilloscope line projected behind them that moved with whatever they were doing. Nothing to look at that was not already the sound.

Subtraction as an aesthetic, not a shortage

The Sähkö catalogue looked the way the music sounded. Sparse sleeves, catalogue numbers doing the work of artwork, and one word Finnish titles that translate as noise, quantum, metre. Vainio released under Ø, and also as Philus, Kentolevi and Tekonivel, aliases that functioned less as personas than as filters. The label was never a genre. It was a threshold, and plenty of records that would have passed anywhere else did not clear it.

It was not narrow, though. Jimi Tenor, whose 1994 album Sähkömies was assembled on basic equipment in a small New York apartment, sat in the same orbit. The connective tissue was an attitude about what could be removed, not a shared tempo.

The reference points were not dance records

Ask Pan Sonic about influences and the list arrived from somewhere else. Suicide first, then Throbbing Gristle and Einstürzende Neubauten, the musique concrète composer Pierre Henry, and the rockabilly outsider Hasil Adkins. Acid house had shaped them in the late 1980s, but by the mid 1990s neither man was following the scene, and it shows in records that keep the pulse of techno while refusing nearly everything that came with it.

Paul Smith of Blast First saw them play in England in the autumn of 1994 and signed them. A John Peel session followed in 1995. In November 2002 they played Helsinki’s Avanto festival on instruments that Erkki Kurenniemi had built in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which is about as precise a summary of their lineage as anyone could stage on purpose.

What is left

Pan Sonic played their last concert in December 2009. Mika Vainio died on 12 April 2017 near Trouville-sur-Mer in France, at 53, after falling six metres from a cliff into the sea. Two autopsies left the circumstances unresolved. Writing a month later, Grönlund described a musician who could not read or write notation and instead “created a language of his own”, built from sound and silence turning into rhythm.

The trademark letter is still the cleanest description of the method. Someone took a character away, and the record that followed was named after the gap. Sähkö had been working that way since 1993, and the catalogue still sounds like a set of decisions about what to leave out.

Sources: The Wire, pHinnWeb, and label discographies.