"I see things in music as very similar to architecture," said Tommi Grönlund. "Repetition of things, of rhythms. I like naked shapes. It's like the music of architecture—music of rational order, mixed with randomness."

In Helsinki's Keilaniemi metro station there's a ceiling sculpture with 280 LED tubes hung from the ceiling and connected by wire. The intended effect is for the tubes to appear to be levitating in a dark void. The sculpture was created (in partnership with Petteri Nisunen) by Grönlund, a contemporary artist who, in his spare time, runs Sähkö Recordings, the label he founded in 1992 with the late musician Mika Vainio. The sculpture serves as a metaphor for Grönlund and Sähkö's role in Finnish music: abstract and sometimes barely there, but part of the fabric. Its genius is simple, and you might not even notice it if you're passing through the station.

Sähkö Recordings (pronounced "sack-uh") is most famous for releasing music by Vainio, a sound artist and techno producer who helped define experimental electronic music from the early '90s through to his death in 2017. With his duo Panasonic (later Pan Sonic), Vainio fused techno, noise and ambient music into fearsome waves of sound. And through his many solo projects, most notably Ø, he built his own frigid and antiseptic sound environment, which even in 2019 sounds like nothing else out there.

Then there's Jimi Tenor, a musician whose work blends jazz, pop and techno. As well as being a core Sähkö artist, Tenor is something of an alternative pop star in Finland. He scored a multi-album contract with Warp Records in the '90s before coming back home to Sähkö.

But it was in Vainio that Grönlund found his true musical partner. Vainio helped Grönlund combine his career in contemporary art, his background in architecture and his love of raving into one of the most distinct and important discographies in electronic music.

Tommi Grönlund

Brian Eno once said everyone who bought the first Velvet Underground album went out and formed a band. Sähkö and Vainio have the same outsized influence among electronic artists—the label counts many of the most important figures in the scene as fans.

"I know that when they first received Sähkö records at Hard Wax, they had a rapturous reception," said Ian Fenton, a Scot who runs the experimental label Frozen Reeds and has lived in Finland for more than 15 years. "Sähkö is part of a pantheon. If you go into Hard Wax, there are some things that are always cool: Aphex Twin is cool, Detroit techno is cool, reggae is cool. Some kinds of world music. And nothing else. Sähkö is a part of that. There aren't many labels that made that kind of mark."

Sähkö releases techno, though the label also veers off into ambient and experimental music, with sub-labels that release house, jazz and pop music. Records on Sähkö are few and far between, which makes them feel special: each is a mysterious transmission from Helsinki, often packaged with abstract imagery, allowing the sounds to speak for themselves. (The most recent release is an anonymous drone record with only a faded image of a Greenland shark.) Most of the acts on the label are Finnish but there are exceptions made for artists, like Atom™ and Madteo, who fit into the label's distinct sound world.

Grönlund, who speaks slowly with a thick and musical accent, referred to Sähkö as an ongoing "art project," and "an expression of elements that can be found in nature and in your surroundings." The word Sähkö translates to "electricity," and comes from an idea Vainio had to start a restaurant and bar with the same name.

The music on Sähkö tends to be minimalist. Sound is arranged in terms of frequencies and tones, often the very sound of electricity or electrical equipment. (Vainio once said his favourite frequency was 50 Hz—"the frequency of the electric grid, ground noise.") Even early techno from Vainio under his Ø alias was sterile and cloistered, like rave music in an anechoic chamber.

"There are sounds on those records that aren't the kind readily digested by clubs or festivals," Fenton said. "Sähkö took sounds more often heard in areas like sound art and put them in a new context, in a way that transformed what was possible in dance music."

Part of this approach comes from Grönlund's background in architecture. (He studied it but never finished his degree.) Early Sähkö releases came with minimal artwork drawn in clean, geometrical shapes. Even the label's logo, with its undulating waves and straight lines, looks like a cross between a waveform and the set of tools at an architect's table. Some of those records had random holes punched in the centre label, highlighting the record's use as a basic tool: you could put it down on the centre rod in a "wrong" configuration and get different results.

Vainio's connection to Grönlund goes back to the late '80s, when the two threw raves in Turku, a small city in the west of Finland that was the country's original capital. Back then, the duo were called the Hyperdelic Housers. A shared interest in house, techno, industrial, EBM and minimalism brought them together, even if they were very different characters: Grönlund the academic, Vainio a self-taught, self-sufficient and resolutely DIY artist. A memorial essay written by Grönlund after Vainio's death mentions that his friend's style also applied to his cooking: "He described his own way of cooking as 'puumies' [woodman] cooking—coarse flavours, animal organs, beans, root vegetables and meat."

Sähkö started as a way to release Vainio's earliest techno. "I put out Mika Vainio's tracks that I thought I would buy myself if I heard them at Hard Wax," Grönlund said. Their partnership went something like this: Vainio would deliver the music, and Grönlund would release it. Grönlund wasn't allowed to touch, influence or say anything about the final product when it came to records by Vainio, except maybe to help with the artwork. "Once I changed the track order for the double-vinyl version of the Ø album Oleva without asking him," Grönlund said in the same essay, "and he got furious and didn't talk to me for four months."

The first two Sähkö releases, the Ø records Röntgen and Kvantti, laid the blueprint for decades of groundbreaking music. The label took everything away until it was just bare frequencies. Even a house EP under the name Guacamole Orchestra sounds strange and uncanny, like a xerox'd reproduction of house music.

Some of Sähkö's most striking records were those from Philus, a project inspired by Vainio's time working in the pharmaceutical industry. With this alias he perfected the eerie, almost empty sound that would become his trademark.

"I used to work at a medicine factory working in a process of making contraceptive capsules," Vainio said in an undated interview. "Every day I had to put on the plastic gear, go through the air lock and get disinfected before entering the bright white production hall. That hall had an extremely cold and inhuman atmosphere. I wanted to create the same kind of ultra-neutral environment."

Around the same time, in the mid-'90s, Grönlund embarked on a project to transform the cityscape of Helsinki—a more ambitious and musically-oriented version of the Keilaniemi metro station installation. He procured a license to broadcast two weeks of radio and curated a series called Ambient City, which was connected to a light installation in a central Helsinki square that would pulse and react to the music.

Tapes from this time are still kicking around. One recording, of Vainio performing live, kicks off a new Sähkö archival series this month. You can also hear some older Grönlund mixes as TG, including one from Ambient City, on Sähkö's website.

Ambient City helped establish Sähkö as a serious project, with performances at the Museum Of Contemporary Art in Helsinki. It was also responsible for bringing the label's other core musician, Jimi Tenor, into the fold. Tenor, real name Lassi Lehto, was living in New York trying to make it as a photographer. "Grönlund showed me the first two EPs from Mika Vainio," he said. "I was really surprised because from Finland, most music would be hard rock or metal, or pretty cheesy stuff. This was something completely different."

Jimi Tenor

Grönlund asked Tenor to contribute some music for Ambient City. He enjoyed Tenor's work, but didn't find it suitable for Sähkö, which Grönlund says was only for "minimal electronic techno" at the time. To release Tenor's music, Grönlund started Puu, which translates to "wood"—the earthy counterpoint to Sähkö's electricity. Among the first releases was a hit by Tenor called "Take Me Baby." The song sounds a little like a bedroom pop precursor to electroclash, and earned airplay on MTV.

The humour and musicality of Tenor's saxophone-heavy music, which has as much in common with smooth jazz as it does with techno, might seem worlds away from Vainio, but there were similarities. "There's a certain simplicity and DIY style to Finnish electronic music," Tenor told me from his home in Helsinki. "The sounds themselves will be simple—there won't be too much movement in the filter, not too many oscillators. Mika would use just one or two, and he wouldn't use pads. I have the same approach."

After signing to the label, Tenor made an arthouse-style film chronicling Sähkö in Turku, Helsinki and on a trip to New York. (You can watch it at Boiler Room.) Filmed on a handheld camera without any discernible narrative, Sähkö: The Movie presents the group as young, shambolic and full of potential. The live performances are intense and often punishing, somewhere between dance music, noise and improv.

The movie's most illuminating scenes highlight one of the label's core contradictions: ultra-serious music made by guys who just like to have fun. One memorable scene features Vainio and company emerging into daylight looking for the next afterparty, as one woman begs Vainio to get in the car with her. It's a silly, frivolous and ultimately characteristic document of Sähkö: there's almost no dialogue and nothing much resembling a plot. Just sound and vision.

Sähkö went through several phases after Tenor joined. The crew moved en masse to Barcelona for an ill-fated stint. (They partied too much and never learned Spanish.) Puu released all kinds of electro, downtempo, jazz and pop from artists like Freestyle Man (an underrated Finnish producer named Klas-Henrik Lindblad), Tenor's wife Nicole Willis and Suicide member Martin Rev. These records highlighted the whimsy and the particularly Finnish sense of humour that didn't always come through in Sähkö's main label.

In 1999 Grönlund started another sub-label, Keys Of Life, with his friend Harri Hännikäinen. It was an outlet for house music, putting out records from the likes of Roberto Rodriguez, Skatebård and Tin Man. He also dove into jazz with Jazzpuu, a sub-label that exists solely to reissue old Finnish jazz records.

Tenor remembers this period fondly. "Sähkö became more artistic later, when Mika Vainio started playing in auditoriums and museums," he said. "But there was this one album in the early times, some kind of circus record [Sirkus by Vainio as Tekonivel]. And this Finnish guy [Brandi Ifgray], who used to be a bandleader but quit his band. He was cleaning offices at night to make money, and he would make songs after. We made a couple of albums with him and then just gave up. Now he's living in Sweden and he's a cleaner at a mental hospital. But I like those albums. They're strange."

After this period of extreme creativity, around the late '00s the label started to slow down. The record industry wasn't as profitable anymore, and so Grönlund funneled his energies into contemporary art. This is when Sähkö entered its next act with a slow trickle of brilliant records, mostly from Vainio as Ø (including two stone cold classic albums, Oleva and Kantamoinen), as well as the lauded Noi No LP from Madteo.

Mika Vainio died in France in 2017. This might well have spelled the end for Sähkö—the loss of its defining artist. But, as death often does, it instead invited reflection and a general reappraisal. Suddenly Sähkö was everywhere. Vainio retrospectives poured in and the label's decades-long impact came more clearly into focus.

Ilpo Väisänen and Mika Vainio

Even with the surge of attention, Sähkö's recent activity has been unsteady and mostly rooted in the past—mainly, unreleased music from Ø and Pan Sonic taken from Sähkö: The Movie, and various Vainio reissues. Puu has kept going in recent years with releases from newer artists like No-Man and R Vincenzo, while Keys Of Life put out records from DJ Sotofett and Tiga.

One 12-inch on Sähkö, released earlier this year, seems to have rejuvenated both the label and Grönlund. Credited to the artist "..." and simply called No Title, the 30-minute drone record caused a stir when it first hit shelves. The label was tight-lipped about who was behind it—even in our conversations, Grönlund told me gravely that he "could not say" who it was.

"The new release might be one new direction for the label," Grönlund told me. "But I'm also very much into minimalistic contemporary classical. I'm looking for stuff that combines these directions with some dubstep or bass music and jazz. I'm waiting for it to happen somehow. I'm listening to lots of internet radio channels, almost 20 hours a day."

In the meantime, the mission of archiving Vainio's life and music continues. Sähkö has just started a new archival series focusing on unreleased material and performances from the past, while Blast First Petite—the label that released the classic Pan Sonic records—is putting out a book about Vainio's life.

"I've been in Finland for quite a long time now," Ian Fenton said. "For me, these are the most important Finnish musicians that ever existed: Jean Sibelius, [jazz drummer] Edward Vesala and Mika Vainio. His records are a standout, not just in Finnish music, but in all of electronic music, for the past 20 or 30 years."

Those involved with the label might say that's an overstatement. Though Finland is a musically obsessed nation (Helsinki has 20-plus record stores and Finland has more metal bands per capita than any other country), Sähkö isn't all that popular at home.

"If someone writes a historical article, people talk about Sähkö. But a lot of it is being forgotten," said Tenor. "Unless you ask the musicians themselves, of course they know. But the kids, I don't think they know anything about it. When Mika died, it got more coverage—and at the same time, my film about Sähkö was shown quite a bit, on Boiler Room, etc. Some younger people found the label like that. But I don't think it translated into any sales because Tommi doesn't have much back catalogue. What he has is in storage, and he's very jealous about it. You can see it but you can't buy it. I ask him, 'Why don't you sell it?' He says, 'I.. can't.' He's not a good business guy."

Talk to Grönlund and you'll learn he's quite stubborn. He does things his way, a trait he shared with Vainio. He'll be the first person to say that Sähkö is no big deal. "We don't have any position in Finland. Nobody knows about us, it's very hard," he said in 1994. Two weeks ago, he told me this: "There's no reason to finish Sähkö. It's nothing important. In 1000 years, nobody will remember it anyway."

Essential Sähkö Records

Ø - Rontgen (Sähkö, 1993)

The record that started it all. Some of the most straightforward music you'll ever hear from Mika Vainio, when his sound was embryonic but still distinctive. It's techno that sounds like it's made from morse code bleeps and sonar pings.

Hertsi - Kohina (Sähkö, 1993)

A one-off record by the Finnish artist Sami Salo, Kohina sounds a bit like Panasonic before Panasonic even existed, with strange rumbles, alien tones and unusual arrangements.

Panasonic - Panasonic (Sähkö, 1994)

The first record from Mika Vainio's much-loved project with Ilpo Väisänen: two ten-minute slabs of heavy and belligerent techno with washes of static and white noise.

Jimi Tenor - "Take Me Baby" (Puu, 1995)

This is the song that launched one of Finland's most interesting and enduring musical careers. It's slightly uncharacteristic for Jimi Tenor, with no saxophone or jazzy instrumentation, but the brutal repetition and deadpan vocal hook stick in your head unlike anything else in the Sähkö catalogue.

Freestyle Man - Come To Dance (Sähkö, 1998)

Freestyle Man, AKA Klas-Henrik Lindblad, is one of the hidden treasures of the Sähkö catalogue. This is one of his best records. Like many Sähkö releases, it puts a peculiar Finnish twist on a familiar sound: this time, Detroit-leaning electro.

Philus - Tetra (Sähkö, 1998)

This is Mika Vainio's project inspired by his time working in the pharmaceutical industry, where he would step into completely silent and sterile spaces. The music is among his most eerie, truly lonely sounding synth music.

Brandi Ifgray - Maurice Fulton Mixes (Puu, 1998)

Brandi Ifgray is Visa Ruokonen, the former frontman of Shadowplay who Jimi Tenor cajoled into making loungey pop records. Both of his albums on Puu are choice Finnish pop, but this 12-inch of Maurice Fulton remixes is one of the best things that the sub-label has ever released.

Martin Rev - Strangeworld (Puu, 2000)

Putting out an album from Suicide cofounder Martin Rev was a major coup for Sähkö, and the results sound like a rougher, post-punk version of Jimi Tenor's music.

Nicole Willis - Soul Makeover (Puu, 2000)

Another criminally overlooked record—an earthy funk and pop album co-produced by Jimi Tenor, Maurice Fulton and Nicole Willis, an American singer who moved to Helsinki after marrying Tenor.

Tin Man - Love Sex Acid (Keys Of Life, 2006)

Tin Man's two records on Keys Of Life, Sähkö's house label, offer a different perspective on the melancholic acid sound he later perfected. This one is bouncy and propulsive while packing the emotional heft of Johannes Auvinen's later work.

Ø - Kantamoinen (Sähkö, 2005)

Kantamoinen is some of the prettiest music Mika Vainio ever made. The 2005 LP owes its poignant allure to its liberal use of melody and softly-textured synths. Kantamoinen is not one of his best-known works, but it's one of the most important, marking the transition of the Ø project from techno into dub-inspired ambient and downtempo.

Bastian Wagner - Elsmfeuer (Sähkö, 2010)

Made mostly with acoustic instruments, this record is a glimpse into Grönlund's modern classical tastes. Wegner integrates subtle electronic elements and has a penchant for savouring the decaying ends of piano notes, mirroring Vainio's approach to signal processing and tones.

Madteo - Noi No (Sähkö, 2012)

This album, Madteo's only record for Sähkö, is the entry point for many of the label's younger fans. It's a relentlessly strange and captivating album of leftfield techno, IDM and strange spoken word loops.

R. Vincenzo - EP (Puu, 2017)

Grönlund signed Brazilian producer R. Vincenzo to Puu when he saw him play at a festival in Finland. He's one of the newest signings to any of the Sähkö labels, and a relative unknown, but his music was made for Puu: warm, earthy and full of organic percussion.

... - No Title (Sähkö, 2019)

A viscerally satisfying mix of electrical signals, hums and other aural detritus, Sähkö's latest record shows how much the label still has to offer.