There was one show, one of the very first shows we played in London, in this place called Vox, and at the middle of the set, it was quite the perfect point, actually, with a really long build up to a loud noise, then when we got into the most intense part the fuses blew from the whole building. So the whole building went pitch black, and this was the end of the show and I think a quite perfect ending.
— Mika Vainio
I first heard about the Finnish music group Pan Sonic from a friend over 20 years ago. It was winter. We were in an apartment highrise looking out over the frozen waters of the North Saskatchewan River to the scattered lights of downtown Edmonton. As part of the sound check, my friend told me, they would hold decibel meters up to the PA system’s speakers. If the amplitude was not loud enough to satisfy them, they would refuse to perform.
While getting hold of the sources and preparing the notes for this text, I was not able to verify the claim my friend made all those years ago. Having now looked into the group’s history, I think the story is accurate, if not in fact then in spirit.
Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen were both born in 1963, in Helsinki and Kuopio respectively.
While studying painting in the late-1980s, Väisänen relocated to Turku, 100 miles west of Helsinki, and there met Vainio through the Hyperdelic Housers group, whose members organized and performed at illegal rave parties.
In the early-1980s, Vainio worked in a slaughterhouse and played in the industrial-noise group Gagarin-Kombinaatti. He then began to DJ. During his time as a DJ he also composed music with Pertti Grönholm under the name Corporate 09.
In 1991 Ilpo Väisänen graduated from the Turku Art Academy and the same year, together with Jari Jula and Kasimir K, formed ultra 3, a performance art group “seeking the limit of total randomness.” When Vainio joined in 1993 they renamed themselves sin Ø. In both iterations, Jari Lehtinen built sound-generating equipment, including bio-electric sensors that detected body heat, heartbeats, bowel activity, the movement of people within performance spaces, and converted this information into sound. Early we see them forcing limits on performance: what sound can do, what can make sound, what music is, what it means — then crossing over into otherness.
Pan Sonic formed in 1994 as “Panasonic” (Greek for all sound) with third member Sami Salo, who left the group 2 years later so he could fulfill his compulsory military service. As Mo Loschelder recalls, that same year Mika, Ilpo and Sami travelled to Berlin, where they visited a club called ELEKTRO on Mauerstraße, which Loschelder had founded with Daniel Pflumm. The club was illuminated by several lighted signs with famous brandnames on them. There was one with the Panasonic logo hanging and flickering in the club window. “The boys enjoyed that object so much that they ended up naming both their band and their first EP Panasonic,” Loschender recalled. If the stolen name wasn’t enough, they also used the same font as the Japanese electronics behemoth. They saw no distinction between their music, the equipment that reproduced it and the corporations that manufactured it. For Vainio and Väisänen it was all one sound belonging to the same form. And here already, their furtive sense of humor seems altogether honed because around this time, Panasonic Electronics’ largest Japanese competitor, Toshiba, planned to license some of the group’s music from their record label, Blast First.
It was not until 1997, after the group’s first American release, that Panasonic USA finally contacted them with threat of legal action unless the name was changed. This did not come as a surprise. Vainio and Väisänen had been wondering why it took the firm so long, and why the complaint came from the United States and not Europe or Japan. It also dashed Väisänen’s hopes of a sponsorship from the corporation. It seemed to him a matter of course, the logical end. Following the legal injunction they changed the name to Pan Sonic. Their next studio album A would be recorded in 1998 and released by Blast First in 1999. “We had to drop the letter ‘a’ from our name, so that’s where the album title came from,” Vainio and Väisänen explained. Such a matter of fact explanation meant that the raw directness of their sound came from concrete language and ideas, essences, the essential.
They positioned themselves in opposition to the velocity, density and color of 90s dance music then popular in UK and European clubs. They did so by insisting on austere compositions that grew out of the sounds themselves. In 1997 Nicholas Barber described Pan Sonic as “Either the future of music or the worst art joke ever.” Barber’s comment might appear noncommittal, perhaps shallow, but it captures the ambivalent response to Pan Sonic’s music in the mid- to late-1990s. In an introduction to his interview of Vainio and Väisänen for Rumba in 1995, Harri Palomäki identifies the group’s sound with the “sparsely beautiful minimalism” of Finland, characterized by architect Alvar Aalto and sculptor Tapio Wirkkala. When Japanese composer Riuchi Sakamoto visited their Barcelona studio in 1999, he thought they were trying to fool him because there was so little equipment in the space. Vainio and Väisänen recorded straight to DAT, with no overdubs, using only a few custom-made instruments designed and built by Jari Lehtinen, Pan Sonic’s “silent” member, who had supplied the hardware for ultra 3 and sin Ø. In a 1995 article for American fanzine The Skreem Mika Vainio described their gear:
“We have a synthesizer which is one big box that has 12 oscillators on it; you can connect them to each other and modulate them together. We also have this small synthesizer which is built into an old typewriter — we call it ‘Typewriter.’ We have several drum modules to make rhythmic sounds which we are using with an 808. Jari Lehtinen is also building us this large synthesizer that will have 8 oscillators and a cross connection board, like the early-70s, late-60s synthesizers.”
One instrument built by Lehtinen caused a bomb scare at airport customs when Pan Sonic was returning from a tour abroad. Mika played it for airport security to demonstrate that it was a musical instrument. Their sound arsenal also included a 7 meter long infrasonic tube called ‘John Holmes,’ which was rumored to emit frequencies so low it loosened a person’s bowels, causing them to defecate. Intentionally or not, their equipment and approach to music gestured towards ideas of destruction and elimination, endings and emptiness.
While performing, the group was bathed in blue light, the Panasonic color, Väisänen once said, as if they had never been legally severed from the corporation. Behind them was projected the vertical line of an oscilloscope, also built by Jari Lehtinen, which reacted to the frequencies and sounds generated on stage, creating a unified presence. But the group did not limit their performances to the nightclub circuit. In 1995 they performed in a parking lot in London’s East End with a notorious Audio Weapons Armored Car System known as the Sound Curdler, loaned to them by Jimmy Cauty of The KLF. When Pan Sonic played Färgfabriken in Stockholm, someone called the police on them. In 1997 at the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria, Pan Sonic performed inside a train which circled the Voestalpine Steelworks, punctuated by sparks and splashes of molten slag, something primordial and apocalyptic all at once. That same year, on the invitation of fashion house Comme des Garçons, they performed live during Paris Fashion Week. The group supposedly played a gig on Easter Island. I have looked high and low but was unable to find images verifying this. They were fond of radio. In 1994 Vainio contributed music under his Ø pseudonym to Ambient City, an exhibition and temporary radio station broadcast at 96.8 MHz. The radio station played ambient music 24/7 with no advertisements or announcements during several 3-week periods that year. In 1996 they played a live session at KISS FM. The same year they recorded a John Peel session on BBC Radio 1. In 1998 they supplied the test tone for the experimental radio station Resonance FM 107.3. Vainio was included in the exhibition series ‘Migrateurs’ in 1997, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and held at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. He resurrected 4 vintage tube radios. One played a recorded CD while the others hid mechanisms that changed their frequency and amplitude at 15 second intervals every few minutes. They were installed on pedestals next to Raoul Dufy’s 1937 painting The Electric Fairy, which represents the birth of electricity. Obrist remembered Vainio’s piece producing such intense vibrations that the museum conservators worried the masterpieces on display nearby could be damaged, reduced by sound to their base materials.
YOU ARE A MUTANT
In his youth, Mika’s father Kalle admired Ernest Hemingway and, up until his son’s birth, dreamt of an adventurer’s life. At this point he started working in a bank and settled down with his new family. Mika’s mother was a nurse.
He hated school and often got bullied by a group of kids who called themselves the Woodhouse Gang.
The bullying ended when they all fell through the Vainio’s attic roof and could not escape. His father said he would let them out if they promised to stop bullying Mika.
He quit school and got a job at a birth control manufacturer, saved up some money and went traveling in Asia.
He learned a lot in the listening- and reading-rooms of libraries.
The first place of his own, near central Turku, was small and unheated. It had an outhouse where he could use the toilet.
In their Psychic TV phase, he and his friends branded their skin with the psychic cross. Mika’s became infected the next day.
Once, while on a walk with his brother, he pointed to a rockface and said, “Imagine if that rock was transparent and filled with pink marmalade.”
In 1989 Mika and his friend Esko Routamaa turned an old carpentry shop into a small club space. Mika decided to use his home stereo for their first acid house event. “He had a nice Denon amp and Infinity RS4 speakers if I remember right. They all blew up the first night,” said Tommi Grönlund.
In 1993 he and Tommi Grönlund started Sähkö Recordings, a label based in Turku that continues to focus on minimalist electronic music.
In Turku he worked in the kitchen of a vegetarian restaurant called Verso, and there built up his culinary knowledge. They fired him for drinking-related reasons.
After Verso he and some friends got a job at a slaughterhouse, where they hoisted halved pig carcasses onto meathooks and pushed them down a track into the meat locker. This was known as ‘dancing with the pig.’
He referred to the minimal techno, drones and noise of Pan Sonic as “horsemeat rockabilly.”
He and Ilpo would sometimes eat raw horsemeat soaked in vodka.
At a factory where he worked Mika stole essence-laden fortified alcohol. He liked the pineapple-flavored stuff best.
“Do you have to drink so much, Mika?”
“Yes.”
After an all-nighter deep in the cups, a friend woke to see him still sitting there, staring at the table. When greeted with a cheerful “Morning!” Mika replied, “You are a mutant.”
He said once that Pan Sonic tried to avoid all the “cyber fractal mystics and new age stuff.”
He liked to listen to all kinds of music, like Basil Kirchin, Franz Schubert, Death Grips, Henry Purcell, Whitehouse, Keiji Haino, Scott Walker, Morton Feldman and Junior Kimbrough.
He never used a computer to make music. He didn’t like that the music was visualized with symbols and colors on a screen.
But he didn’t believe that music was only a change in air pressure. Music could be based on the visual and the physical, too.
“For me music is about emotions, for me the so-called absolute music doesn’t exist, it’s always connected to emotions and that’s what matters to me.”
The names of his compositions, as well as those of Pan Sonic, were short, often just one Finnish word — titles like Sisään (In), Koituva (Dawning), Viemärimaailma (Sewageworld), Keskeisvoima (Centralforce), Ensi (Next), Toisaalta (Secondly) and Hän Oli Ääni Joskus (He Was a Sound Sometimes). Each stands for a world built of sound.
Ilpo spoke fondly of his silent, shared commitment to sound-hunting with Mika, that Mika would quietly “grunt, sigh, and mutter expletives” when he wasn’t getting the sound he wanted out of his instrument.
“Mika, who do you make this music for?”
“The ones who like it.”
His installation -27 was situated in a museum corridor visitors passed through to get from gallery to gallery. Many didn’t realize they were passing through sound art until they saw the wall label.
“My favorite frequency is 50 Hz — the frequency of the electric grid, ground noise,” he said.
While lying in bed late one night, he heard the beeping of close-by traffic signals phasing in and out of sync, which gave him the idea for the track Twin Bleebs, found on his acclaimed album Metri (Sähkö Recordings, 1994).
In the late-1980s he worked for a large medical firm that specialized in the manufacture of birth-control implants. There he performed his duties in a sealed area entered through an airlock, wearing sterilized plastic overalls with safety glasses, mask and gloves, isolated from all human contact. This work experience influenced his project Philus.
Sometimes when his music was described as emotionless, he disagreed, and compared it to monochromatic paintings that become gradually more affective as the viewer concentrates at length on a single color field.
His performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, atop a large cylinder designed by Shigeru Ban, repelled most of the audience.
When Brian Eno wanted to meet him at an event, Mika was either too drunk or too hungover and declined.
When Esko Routamaa praised the effective use of pauses and silence on his album Revitty, Mika looked at him, puzzled, and said, “I didn’t use pauses. They are part of my music.”
His music was much loved in Italy.
His favorite fans were in Argentina.
“Why can’t you make the kind of music Darude makes?” his father asked.
“Because it’s not my business.”
When commissioned to create music he always delivered the finished compositions by post on burned CD-Rs.
Mika was disappointed when his installation Onko had been situated in the circular vestibule entrance of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, instead of in the museum café, where he had intended.
In 2001 he attached microphones to Antoni Tàpies’ rooftop sculpture Núvol i cadira (Cloud and Chair, 1990). The microphones picked up varying sounds made by the metal sculpture and its surroundings, depending on the weather and time of day.
His installation 2 x 540 kHz consists of 6 vintage tube radios that play 2 different loops at 540 kHz, 3 playing one loop, 3 playing the other. The loops play continuously but are of different lengths so their mutual correspondence always changes.
His installation 3 x Wall Clocks consists of 3 identical clocks commonly found in public buildings. A contact microphone is attached to each and amplifies their mechanisms. Despite the clocks all telling the same time, they operate slightly out of sync, creating an irregular tick-tock rhythm which overlays the unseen, unheard temporal dimension of the exhibition space, experienced subjectively by each gallery visitor.
The name of Pan Sonic’s second album Kulma (Angle) was inspired by the art of Kazimir Malevich and Marcel Duchamp. Mika and Ilpo travelled to St. Petersburg to look at the paintings of Malevich and to Stockholm to see Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Duchamp’s Large Glass made a considerable impression on them.
In 2015 Mika and Tommi Grönlund collaborated on the installation 808. A Roland TR-808 drum machine is set in a glass display case atop a bed of red velvet. Inside the drum machine is a 1 minute and 46 second piece composed and programmed by Mika. It was not preserved any other way besides in the memory of the TR-808, quietly sealed inside its glass display case.
He was interested in cinema, especially the films of Bresson, Tarkovsky, Renoir and Ozu.
When he and Esko watched Eraserhead they ate crocodile tail.
He was a talented cook. “One of his bravura dishes was rabbit, marinated in herbs and oil and slowly roasted,” Ilpo said.
On one occasion Mika invited some friends to his Barcelona apartment for dinner at 9 o’clock. He had prepared the meal to be served precisely at 9. They showed up an hour late. He answered the door naked, with a bottle of wine in one hand and a machete in the other, told them the party was over and slammed the door in their faces. Coming home late at night, he would sometimes forget his rare reggae records in the taxi.
In April, 2017, he was supposed to meet Esko Routamaa, Jimi Tenor and Tommi Grönlund in Paris, where they had planned to begin a vacation together. Instead, they tracked him down in a Paris drunk tank. His stylish clothes were tattered. His lips were chapped.
He was angry that he’d forgotten his hat on the plane.
He wondered how they found him.
He was excited, too, though, about the prospect of eating oysters and seeing more new episodes of Twin Peaks.
His drinking increased. He would lose his temper, take off his shirt and become aggressive with his friends.
On April 11th Mika spent the night in a Normandy hospital, where he had an EKG taken.
His friends saw him the following morning and shouted for him. His back was turned. He responded to their shouts with a raised hand but didn’t turn around. He held his hand up briefly while walking away.
It was almost time for his friends to return home. They inquired at a police station, concerned over Mika’s whereabouts. Jimi Tenor’s French was the best. He was probably doing most of the talking. An officer asked him into a private room, where he was informed that Mika’s body had been found the previous day, some hours after they last saw him.
Mika died in Trouville-sur-Mer after falling 6 meters off a cliff into the ocean. Even though he was autopsied twice — in France and later in Finland — the cause of his death remains unknown. It was never determined why he went to the hospital the night before. “Found next to Mika’s body was his shoulder-slung bag, with 5 cigars, a phone, a tablet computer, an EKG chart, a book of poems by Sylvia Plath and some mud. The Plath book was very dear to him and always with him,” his father said.
— Dustin Cole is the author of two novels, Notice (Nightwood Editions, 2020) and Run the Bead (Soyos Books, 2023), as well as the poetry collection After Sunstone (Farthest Heaven, 2025).