- Pan Sonic's Gravitoni ended with a six-minute supernova called "Pan Finale," hinting that it was to be the Finnish duo's final album. Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen have kept busy since then, but not without revisiting their long-time collaboration. In 2014, they issued a punishing live set from 2009, and now they've resurfaced with an hour-long album of new material.
Atomin Paluu is new in the sense that it's unheard. The music was actually recorded during the last five years the duo was together, made for a documentary of the same name (The Return Of The Atom in English) about the construction of a nuclear power plant in Finland. It's an obvious fit for a duo obsessed with electricity and physics, whose music often sounds like the inner workings of vast machinery. Vaino edited their award-winning score into this album after the fact, and the end result is less a comeback or grand finale than a lost shred of Pan Sonic's discography. It's a must-have for power-electronics aficionados, but a relatively minor entry in an already dense catalogue.
By the time Gravitoni came out, Vainio and Väisänen had brought their sound to the brink. They took their experiments with dynamics and volume through almost two decades of innovation, before essentially setting them on fire. Atomin Paluu has its aggressive moments, like the piston-firing drums in "Part 03," but the album devotes most of its time to an uncanny quietude. When they aren't bombarding you with perfectly sculpted volleys of fuzz, the duo deal in razor-thin tones, like the resonance of glass or the uneasy hum of misaligned audio cables. Half the time it's unnerving, and the other half it's eerily beautiful.
Atomin Paluu toys with tension and release like a thriller movie. Vainio and Väisänen pull between extremes so much that it fast becomes a challenging listen. Following the first half's bumpy ride, things falters slightly in the second, where drones are teased for extended periods or we're left to relish the silence. By the time the killer three-track finale roars into view, the intended effect is diminished.
In terms of sound design, Atomin Paluu is up there with Pan Sonic's best. Take it as a series of impeccable studio experiments and it carries on their most gripping moments. As an album it's a harder sell. But what Pan Sonic fan would ever want accessibility? Vainio and Väisänen have always been about feeling out the limits of electronic music, and there are bits and pieces of that here, alongside ponderous passages of silence and stillness.
Tracklist01. Atomin Paluu Part 1
02. Atomin Paluu Part 2
03. Atomin Paluu Part 3
04. Atomin Paluu Part 4
05. Atomin Paluu Part 5
06. Atomin Paluu Part 6
07. Atomin Paluu Part 7
08. Atomin Paluu Part 8
09. Atomin Paluu Part 9
10. Atomin Paluu Part 10
11. Atomin Paluu Part 11
12. Atomin Paluu Part 12