Valosaasteen Sekaan is the second album from Finnish elemental noise controllers Musta Huone, and draws its mood from a post-COVID world. The band recorded it in their own studio in Helsinki as well as a cabin in Anttola and they are Ville-Matti Koskiniemi (guitar & vocals), Joonas Paasiala (drums), Santeri Paasiala (bass), & Pietu Arvola (synths and noise).
The opening track is a degraded and decaying reel to reel tape of mall muzak, which is the gateway from our reality to a dimension built on the band’s own anarchic topography. The first full track, ‘Heijasteet’ (‘Reflectors’), shows they can control the building blocks of raw sound and layer jagged guitars and drones as the bedrock over which a saxophone has to fight to be heard. ‘Aika valuu sormien läpi’ (‘Time slips through the fingers’) is a slow, syncopated psych-procession featuring hypnotic vocal chanting punctuated by ground-splitting explosions of sound. ‘Valosaasteen sekaan’ (‘Among the light pollution’) is haunting and motorik and Ville-Matti describes it “as an illustrious example of the word ‘chaos’, as that is what both the creative process and its makers consisted of during the album’s making”.
‘Pysähdytään hetkeksi’ (‘Let’s stop for a moment’) is exactly that, a short ambient track that acts like a pause before the breath is soon knocked out of you by the full force of ‘Kuun palvojat’ (‘Worshipers of the Moon’), a coruscating, escape velocity rocket-ride built on the kind of guitar distortion that can remove skin, although they do manage to weave a lovely tune into the scorched earth firestorm. ‘Aurinko, aurinko’ (‘Sun, sun’) closes the album with a punishing ten-minute thrill-ride wrapped in deep tissue distortion; relentless and exhilarating, it resonates in such a way that when it finally ends it takes a good while before the molecules in your body stop vibrating.
Musta Huone expertly surf boiling magma. They marshal the forces of nature and noise and concentrate them into tracks that are monolithic and invigorating.
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Review by Paul F Cook
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