- The music Ilpo Väisänen made with Mika Vainio as Pan Sonic pioneered a strain of broken, experimental techno that dovetailed with an interest in industrial and power electronics. They made custom gear, modified existing machines and played with the sounds of machinery itself, highlighting the encroaching presence of technology in our lives. As I-LP-O In Dub, Väisänen explores another contemporary concept, rewiring dub, techno and ambient to explore themes of finance, capitalism and ubiquitous consumption.
Väisänen's take on dub techno is insular, more concerned with negative space than delay effects. The first album, Communist Dub, used severe electronics to convey the crumbling of the global financial system into chaos and austerity. Dub effects became tools of disorientation. Capital Dub, Chapter 1, inspired by the first volume of Karl Marx's Capital, explores late capitalism, where the normal rhythms of economics are interrupted by bursts of unexpected noise and deep fractures.
The album begins with the sound of rain before technology takes over. The pitter-patter of the drums mimics the water until the pattern falls apart. After that, it's bedlam, which is where the record's theme of instability really comes in. Fits and spurts of broken techno fade out into the barely-there dark ambient rumblings of "Hidden Capital." Things get more lively on "Invisible Hand," where snares scuttle across the stereo spectrum, but dub effects makes it illusory and confusing, any sense of centre or stability forcibly shaken out of the track. Other tracks are barely more than a modulated bassline, save for the dubstep lurch of "Dark Money Dub" or the shaking "Fear Of Heaping Capital," so buried in dub and delay effects that it seems encased in a blob of jello.
There was a sense of awe to Väisänen's work with Vainio, a force that represented the duo's power over technology but also the instability and anxiety it can bring (check the explosive crescendos of the final Pan Sonic album, Gravitoni). Anxiety is at the heart of Capital Dub, Chapter 1, which vibrates with nervous energy. The older music that Väisänen was involved with sounded impossibly futuristic, even alien. Now it just sounds like the world around us, tense and on the verge of collapse.
Tracklist01. Paradise Capital
02. Dark Money Ride
03. Hidden Capital
04. Divided Investments Complexity
05. Dark Money Dub
06. Invisible Hand
07. Grey Zone Economy
08. Parecon
09. Fear Of Heaping Capital
10. Grace Of Collapsing Unhealthy System