Mika Vainio – A Quiet Life (part 1)

Mika Vainio (1963-2017) is considered to be one of the world's most important electronic musicians. His death was received abroad with much sadness last spring. Both his solo works and Pan Sonic, his collaboration with Ilpo Väisänen, have been lauded by the likes of Björk and Brian Eno. KulttuuriCocktail interviewed Vainio's friends, next of kin and collaborators.

Kalle Vainio

Found next to Mika's body was his shoulder-slung bag, with five cigars, a phone, a tablet computer, an EKG chart, a book of poems by Sylvia Plath and some mud. The Plath book was very dear to him and always with him.

The EKG was taken in a Normandy hospital on April 11th, 2017. On the next day Mika died after falling six meters off a cliff into the sea. The cause of his death is still undetermined, even though he was autopsied twice - in France and later on in Finland.

There are unresolved things about Mika's death, like his hospital visit on the night before the accident. The fact is, though, that my son is not coming back, even if those questions were answered. On the other hand I'd prepared myself for the possibility of something like this for years.

Mika was born in Helsinki on May 15th 1963, but for the most part we lived in Turku and for a few years in Lapland in the early seventies. I worked in a bank and went hunting as a hobby. Mika's mother worked as a nurse. In my youth I admired Ernest Hemingway and dreamt of an adventurer's life until Mika's birth and family life carried me away.

I was particularly interested in literature and the visual arts. My only experience of making music was as a child, when I used to hum polkas and finnish folk melodies of my own making in the sauna, unheard and in secret. I liked trendy clothes and followed fashion, but I don't know if these things had any bearing on my child's artistic bent. After all Mika was so very unique.

I bought quite a few vinyl records for the home. I remember realizing Mika's musicality for the first time when I played records by Sandy Nelson or Art Blakey. He'd run to the speaker on his little kid feet and jump up and down to the rhythm, with precision. I started taking him to jazz concerts from when he was small and taught him to listen to a variety of music.

Musicality seems to have been latent in him from the start, because he couldn't play instruments. If he whistled, it would be out of tune. Music just needed to grow out of him over time and become its own form of self-expression.

A comment by the school music teacher bolstered this unmusical image. He had said in front of everybody, "Even if that Vainio boy is not very bright, perhaps we'll think of something for him." Mika remembered this comment for the rest of his life. He might have gotten some energy of retribution from the teacher's nonchalance. But for a child, it must've been a crushing thing to hear.

Mika's desire to be an artist didn't surprise me. What did was that Mika could develop music quite in his own way and become famous by doing it.

Mika was a wonderful and open child - until school started. If Mika had started school today, the messages on Wilma (ministry of Education intranet system) about him would have blown up in a few weeks.

He hated school as much as one can. By himself he'd read massive amounts of fiction and nonfiction, but not when told. Since very young, his will and love of freedom had guided him through difficulty to victory.

Mika didn't even finish ninth grade and complete his basic education. He might have written that qualification into his work applications, but it wasn't true. It was just that nobody thought to ask for the paperwork.

Part of my son's loathing for school was based on bullying. In the Finland of the 1970s - compared to today - bullying didn't trouble the authorities.

It changed his psyche and artistry, and ultimately defined it. He was tormented by a gang called the puutalojengi - the woodhouse gang - who picked on the accent he'd acquired in Lapland or just chased him on the way to school for no particular reason.

The worst scar was left on my son by the bullies when they picked on his creativity and success. When Mika was in the lower grades, he held a joyful and lively speech that had the entire crowd laughing and cheering. He shared his plans about what he would do at Artjärvi, his beloved summer place.

The bullies saw their chance. They started to make fun of his performance. As a result of this, my happy and talkative son became quiet and withdrawn and developed a hard shell around himself.

Mika was ultimately extremely sensitive, even to the day he died. Although he had a macho street fighter image with tattoos and scars, inside him lived a small, timid and curious boy. As an adult he always sided with the weak, especially children. When children were picked on, he would always interfere, even at the risk of his life.

Mika completely lost his temper once when the father of a turkish family living above his Berlin apartment was beating his children. He ran upstairs to beat down the door and tell the man to stop beating innocent children. Soon a guard of armed turks in leather jackets showed up to look for the "american who had interfered with internal family business". Luckily they didn't find Mika.

The bullying ended as a result of a curious coincidence. The woodhouse gang had accidentally broken through the roof into - of all places - our attic storage unit and gotten themselves imprisoned. When I found the gang crying for help, I made them promise to stop bullying Mika in exchange for their freedom. They made good on their promise, but the bullying had already made its mark. On the other hand, he did have a lot of good friends too.

This whole bullying scenario became clear to me when it was already too late. Something else dawned on me later on as well. My son, who performed poorly in school, had found his way to survive and express himself: through music.

Antti Viitala

The music department of Turku main library became Mika's second home since prepubescence. At some point his parents started to wonder where their eldest was spending so long after school. They feared he might be into drugs, but when they found out they could breathe a sigh of relief - Mika was just going to the library to listen to records and read foreign music magazines.

The countless hours spent in the listening and reading rooms at the library, and later lending books, were Mika's primary education. For him, thinking of the arc of his life, studying the works of other artists was equal to creating his own.

Even though Mika remained an electronic musician throughout his active career, he listened to music and sought influences from all possible genres. Even as a youngster he was a great consumer of art, thoroughly immersed. The hits of Madonna and the cantatas of Mozart spun on the turntable in the listening room equally.

If we think of all the genres he went through, he used most of his time on experimental music, old blues and classical. But I'm sure somebody would remind us that he was well versed in jamaican music and jazz as well.

Mika had the skill to find the rare and curious in music as well as in other arts - without being a novelty seeker. He liked the outer edges and small pressings, hard-to-get records like the works of Loren Mazzacane Connors.

When Mika started to get money by doing menial work, the first thing he bought was a good stereo system. He liked to listen to music at an extreme volume. So his new speakers blew up on the first night - he was burning both the candle and his stereo at both ends. It wasn't the only time a piece of musical equipment broke down in his hands.

If Mika's music started playing in a cafe, I would recognize it in a few seconds. The world may be full of electronic music, but the work of Mika Vainio is easy to recognize from certain types of snap sounds, the use of silence and very low frequencies. Often his music begins from silence and ends in silence.

I don't know how he ended up making the music he did. Maybe his multilayered attitude to life, his love of electronic instruments and the search for fascinating sounds had their part to play. Old electronic instruments offered many challenges. He never used a computer to make music. It was handicraft and electricity all in one.

I didn't take Mika's artistic career very seriously at first. I just thought he had a more cerebral take on techno than other Turku folks. I was used to spending time with him and I couldn't see what was happening.

I remember a morning in the early 90s when I heard through the door from the next room that Mika had started composing already at eight in the morning. I left for the day and when I came back in the early evening I found him still crouched in the same concentrated pose, twisting knobs, and he didn't want to go out for dinner.

I realized then for the first time that when you are this serious about your art, you will make it far. I was surprised by his dedication. I was terribly proud of him, of course, but I was also dismayed by how art superseded everything else in his life.

Occasionally Mika would talk a lot, but mostly he would answer as briefly as possible. Once when we were listening to some extremely experimental music I asked him who he thinks the artist is making this work for. "The ones who like it", he answered. If someone wondered if he really had to drink so much, he said "Yes." One young american woman surmised that Mika was silent because he didn't speak english. "I don't like disco", was the retort.

Mika was an eternal child. This showed in his ability to experience art. He was so excited by Tarkovsky's Stalker that he suggested us and Ilpo Väisänen should have a Stalker-themed day out. We went up on the rocky hill at Kumpula in Helsinki, still deserted in the early nineties, to vibe on the movie's scenes.

He saw nature differently from the rest of us. Once on a walk with my brother he had pointed at a rockface and said "Imagine if that rock was transparent and filled with pink marmalade." I felt that he could see into a dimension beyond the rest of us. He could put himself in the experiential world of a whale or, say, a rockface.

These observations are also audible in his music. For instance, the famous track Twin Bleebs from Metri (1994) was born when he was lying in his bed late at night, listening to the beeping of traffic lights in a nearby intersection, phasing in and out of sync.

One of my most beautiful memories of Mika was when at the end of one of our nights out in the bars he joked that he would go sit in Senate Square until love would come and find him. Because nothing could be just a throwaway line with Mika, he really did go and sit in the square until morning came. Whether love found him there, that's a different story.

Sami Salo

I got to be an assisting member of Pan Sonic briefly in the early 90s - in truth it was always Mika Vainio's and Ilpo Väisänen's project.

It was a happy time, because there was no internet yet. If we'd had the internet, we would've listened to far too much music and thrown up our hands: others are doing this better than us already, all we can do is give up.

Living in a cultural vacuum made our music original and unique sounding. Difficulty is good, especially in art - both in making and acquiring it. A young listener of electronic music today has a hard time understanding how hand-crafted and punk-spirited Mika's music is.

Mika, like any of the experimental electronic artists of his era, didn't have a mold to fit. We made the mold ourselves.

What set him apart was an ability to look for sounds that others wouldn't have - and what's more important, he would go to the trouble it took to find them. Very few have had the courage to make something so pared down, too. In my eyes Mika was the most spartan and engineer-like of us doing this. I remember a quiet figure sitting for hours looking for the right sounds. He would drink tea in the studio, sit quietly, turn the knobs or listen to records.

Atte Vainio

Me and my brother had a custom of asking "So what have you eaten?" first thing on the phone. Culinary pursuits were an important channel of communication and way of spending time together for us. Mika and I were particularly fascinated by exotic foods. The women on our father's side of the family are excellent cooks, and I think our interest and skill comes from that side: carelian culinary arts.

When he was young, Mika worked as a kitchen hand in the vegetarian restaurant Verso in Turku for many years. He learned a lot about cooking there. When his drinking got him fired, he and a couple of his unemployed friends got jobs at the slaughterhouse. There they "danced with the pig", meaning lifted halved pig carcasses onto meathooks and pushed them along a track into the cooler. Mika's physical condition improved a lot in those days.

When Mika started doing music and supporting himself with his art in the early 90s, would only eat white bread and tuna at the studio. But deep down he was always a culinarist. Once in his later years he said that the best food culture was found in New Zealand.

We had no sibling envy. The only thing that I am a bit jealous for is the traveling. Because of his performances, Mika got to basically travel around the world and visit very exotic places. He got on the road when he was very young. After quitting school he worked in a place that made contraceptive pills. After he had gathered enough money, he went off to tour Asia.

We had a curious symbiosis or division of roles. When I was little, I was the autistic one and Mika was lively. At some point, puberty perhaps, those roles were reversed and Mika became the quiet one. I can't explain why that happened.

Mika's first home was a small, trashy unheated house with an outhouse near central Turku. Mika worked at the time at a factory that manufactured essences for food manufacture, and he would steal essence-laden fortified alcohol - pineapple-flavored, mostly.

I remember a time when we had laboriously heated the house with wood we'd stolen from a demolition site and gotten trashed on fortified alcohol. I found myself in the morning sitting in the outhouse, smelling of pineapple and old alcohol. I had a frosty old free newspaper for wiping, a cold wind whistled in my ass. I cried then, thinking there could not be a more terrible thing. But these conditions, I guess, were an everyday thing for Mika.

When Mika found the music department at the library Mika was a prog guy who would listen to lots of Gentle Giant, Pink Floyd and Yes. Some important finnish records were Kadonnut laakso by Leevi and the Leavings, Aino by Dave Lindholm and Punainen planeetta by Tuomari Nurmio, to mention but a few.

In addition to Melody Maker Mika started reading The Guardian, and recommended it to me as well. If he was somewhere politically, I'd say he was on the left. He refused to open for Suicide's Alan Vega in the US, because Bush was president.

Later his religion became the experimental english band Psychic TV. Their performances and music made such an impression on him that he and his friend decided to brand the band's logo, the so-called Psychic Cross, on themselves. They used his kukri knife, heated in the sauna stove. I can still remember the screams, they were horrifying.

The scars got infected the next day. Our childhood friend Antti Viitala had to help take care of them. You can still see the scars if you look at his arms in some live performance videos.

The sauna was important to him for creativity. His and later Pan Sonic's first studio and rehearsal space was in the sauna building of Mika Hannula's family. My brother and his bandmates used to first go in the sauna and then get to working.

Part of the gear was bought by Pan Sonic themselves, some of it was custom-built by Jari Lehtinen. He designed some amazingly imaginative equipment: a swallowable microphone, an instrument with such a powerful sound that statues shattered at an art museum where Pan Sonic played. Another piece of gear by Lehtinen caused a bomb alert at airport customs when the band was returning from abroad. Mika had to play it for them to prove that it was a genuine musical instrument.

I was the one to suggest to Mika that he should start composing eight hours a day and treat his art more as a job than just jams. And so he did.

I have no ability to evaluate Mika's music, because I'm not musical - let alone understand something of the tropes of electronic music. From my childhood I remember getting bored of listening to vinyl records quite often, when Mika and our father would be endlessly fascinated by them.

It feels pretty wild that Brian Eno had wanted to meet Mika and chat with him at some event, but that due to his state of either drunkenness or hangover Mika had been unable to do so.

As an artist, Mika was on an extremely high level, but he could have gone higher. Alcoholism might have had a positive effect on his wild creativity and courageousness, but from the point of view of next of kin it was more of a really sad and painful thing to watch. I almost broke off communication once after he broke some things at my place while drunk and I had to throw him out.

It was surprisingly hard for Mika to take that his parents didn't understand his significance and achievements as an artist. Ultimately something like this might have had a big effect, under the surface.

In his latter days Mika's drinking and depression got worse. He also started to hate flying more than anything - another reason why going to gigs became harder and harder.

Springtime was difficult for Mika. That last spring he was particularly depressed and didn't sleep well. He was melancholy, mulling over all the bad things he'd said to people.

Last winter I visited him in Oslo where Mika lived for a year and a half with his new partner. Even though he wasn't well, we had good and important conversations.

It was then he admitted to me that he had a problem with alcohol, at more than 50 years old.

Mika was shocked and worried after hearing in the spring that our mother had gotten ill. This might have triggered his final phase of drinking. It is my understanding that Mika died after having a fall on his trip to Normandy, most likely while drunk. Now I have to get by without my brother. It isn't easy.

Ilpo Väisänen

I can't get my head around the fact that Mika is dead. It has been a depressing, sad and shitty thing to accept, but you just have to get through it. We hadn't had much to do with each other for several years, even though Pan Sonic never really broke up. We were on good terms up until the end, but we were quiet. We communicated through short emails. We never did talk for long stretches. Instead of talking, we did.

Me and Mika originally bonded over our shared interest in electronic music and illegal parties.

Thinking back, we might've bonded most of all over a similar way of being quiet and a desire to train ourselves to understand art in as broad a way as possible. For us, there was no music that was better or worse - there was only music.

On the other hand we could be bored or change interests quite quickly. Jimi Hendrix bored us after a few listens, but we got stuck on Brian Eno and Talking Heads for a long time.

Our life together in Pan Sonic was based on the intensity of our quiet passion - both for our music and for the art that was around us. Mika would grunt, huff and repeatedly say "perkele" in his own quiet way while searching for the right sound from his instrument. Our goal was to hunt for sounds together. We didn't have a manifesto, because it would have sounded like a political thing. We just wanted to create and bring our musical world out for others to hear.

Even though that search took time and effort, the music needed to take us - it wasn't easy to fit together this enormous fuss and that state of flow. We devoted almost all our days to this combination, from 11 in the morning till 6 at night.

This routine and pragmatism was specifically Mika's wish. The fact is that most of the sounds we could get were awful crap. You don't get the good sounds without long hours.

Electronic gigs might look and even sound like the musicians are just standing around pressing buttons, but we trained many weeks for one gig. We couldn't read music, but we made meticulous notes on how to find the right sounds in a live situation and when we would improvise.

At first we were hated. When Pan Sonic played Färgfabriken in Stockholm, people called the police on us. The reason was that we didn't play rhythmic music. People wanted their 4/4 easily danceable techno. In Berlin, someone in the audience poured beer all over my equipment.

But we believed in our thing so much - we had a hell of a passion for our music.

It was only in the early 2000's that we really broke through and people started to understand what our music was all about. Without that belief in our own art we would've quit many times over. There was absolutely no money in it. We were never financially well off, although the glowing words of the music press might have led you to believe otherwise.

I marvel at the fact I'm still alive. I live in Kuopio now. Making a living as an experimental musician in that town these days means that you need to do gigs for next to nothing, bring your own equipment and be rewarded with all kinds of pissing and moaning. But I'll go on. It's what Mika would have done.

Me and Mika's favorite record in our oeuvre is Kulma (1996). The opener Teurastamo was born from Mika's memories of working in the slaughterhouse in Turku. After a torturous search he'd found a noise in his machine that sounded like a screaming pig.

Kulma is our most brutal album, it hits you like a stern whip across the back of the head. Despite the poor sound quality it's our most direct and uncompromising work.

The names of our songs were often born when Mika made a good meal and put on some Brian Eno. Then we would smoke and look for good-sounding words in dictionaries.

The name Kulma was inspired by the art of Marcel Duchamp and russian constructivism. We went all the way down to St. Petersburg to look at the paintings of Malevich and to Stockholm to see Duchamp's La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, which had a tremendous effect on us. We gazed at it for hours. Then we were quiet for a moment, went to get drunk while still being quiet and then got on the plane. The only thing we said in Stockholm was "fuck you and Abba is shit."

The biggest inspiration for our art was cinema and images. I still feel that our music would be a good fit for some David Lynch movies. We might have avoided taking influences from music, because we were worried we would copy artists we were fans of, without noticing it. That's why we reached out to, say, a moment or image in Tarkovsky's Stalker. In addition to movies we would give each other book tips.

I recommended Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward and Gogol's Dead Souls - which I think is the best novel ever written - to Mika. He had in turn a great appreciation for Richard Flanagan's novel Gould's Books of Fish. He also appreciated Sylvia Plath's poetry and Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men. These books influenced both Mika's solo work and Pan Sonic productions.

I don't particularly want to dwell on Mika's dark side. Occasionally his behaviour would disturb me, of course, but I very much appreciate how much he straightened himself out when we were doing Pan Sonic for those ten-plus years.

Mika was at his happiest when had a really nice plate of food in front of him or had succeeded in in his own cooking. One of his bravura dishes was rabbit, marinated in herbs and oil and slowly roasted in an oven. Food for him was a kind of meditation and euphoria. He was particularly happy when eating oysters. I heard that was the last meal he had before he died.

My best memory of Mika might be a concert of ours where we played in a metal foundry inside a small train car while red, glowing molten metal was being poured around us. Now that was something.

Part 2 here: https://telegra.ph/Mika-Vainio--A-Quiet-Life-part-2-08-03