Vainio, Mika & Franck Vigroux

Vainio, Mika & Franck Vigroux

Ignis

Cosmo Rhythmatic

“A stunning set of previously unheard posthumous recordings from Mika Vainio aided and abetted by Franck Vigroux. Haunting, cinematic, extreme electronic panoramas of the highest order…Mika Vainio and Franck Vigroux’s brutal yet filigree electronics come to light in ‘Ignis’, which finally discloses the further, etheric results of recording sessions that made up their ‘Peau Froide, Léger Soleil’ album in 2014, their celebrated previous collaboration for Cosmo Rhythmatic.Posthumously issued following Mika’s untimely death in 2017, Ignis taps into the pair’s mutual respect for unsound and proprioceptive allusion, operating at liminal levels of tonal and spatial perception in a six track LP that leaves the project with a sense of unresolved tension.Since Pan Sonic ceased operations in 2009, Mika found one of his sharpest foils in French multi-instrumentalist Franck Vigroux. They embarked on a lengthy creative process, articulated through studio and live performances, resulting in the powerful Peau Froide, Léger Soleil album and further recordings planned for a 2nd release. The end results of these efforts are collected on Ignis, a set of six parts paying tribute to a mutual fascination with what lies at and beyond the threshold of sonic comprehension. Where their previous effort traded in a mix of colossal, pendulous industrial funk and abyss-baiting doom, this one fully embraces the void in all its glorious mystery.From a trail of icy bleeps, Brume lures us into cathedral-like ice cave dimensions with breathtaking cinematic effect, before the antechamber of Ne te retourne pas highlights those supposed dimensions with streaks of phosphorescing...

Vainio, Mika & Franck Vigroux

Peau Froide, Leger Soleil

Cosmo Rhythmatic

Sheathed in some of the best album artwork of 2015, Mika Vainio and Franck Vigroux reveal the buzzing and psyched-out electronic sculptures of 'Peau froide, léger soleil' on Shapednoise's Cosmo Rhythmatic label. The latest and arguably most powerful in a long line of collaborations between the Finnish producer and his peers aesthetically finds him closest to the crushing electronics + processed guitar equations of 'Life (… It Eats You Up)' (2011) or 'Kilo' (2013), but also with a couple of brilliant runs into vocodered, sidereal electronics that really set this record apart. Three years in the making, following a live collaboration in Paris 2012, 'Peau froide, léger soleil' is an exercise in sensitive intensity and spatial scale, seamlessly mapping Vigroux's alchemical guitar process into Vainio's free swaggering structures and tonal extremities. From the deep freeze intro and craggy peaks of opener 'Deux', they take in the ice palace designs of 'Mémoire', which first reveals the strange voices that come to haunt the rest of the record, emerging from the buzzsaw blasts and subbass waves of 'Souffles' like the ghost of Bruce Haack, or creeping like hyaline spectres from the microtonal gloam of 'Ravages'. However, if you're after out-and-out Vainio wreckage, they excel at that too with later trax such as the white-out guitar storm of 'Parabole', and certainly in the finishing move of funked-up electro bass riffs and banking amp buzz entitled 'Le crâne tambour'.  Effectively it's the heaviest you'll hear from this icy and bloodied corner of the...