Mika Vainio - Life (...It Eats You Up) (2011)

It’s true to a different degree with every release, but there’s no comfortable listening volume for Mika Vainio’s solo work. The Finn’s penchant for extremes of grating noise and disquieting ambience leaves the listener with a vexing problem: Adjust the volume to the loudest sounds and you miss the finer details that make up ambience; raise the volume to resolve those details and sooner or later, … well, then you’ve asked for it. Sometimes you need to ride the dial, but Vainio at his most intense has a way of making Whitehouse sound like aesthetes. Perhaps it’s how he keeps us from overthinking our visceral response to the music. With his latest release for the Editions Mego label, Life (...It Eats You Up), Vainio’s assault on an aural middle ground has reached a sort of apotheosis