Year: 2025
Label: Dunkelheit Produktionen
We’ve reviewed a number of releases by Finnish experimental act Absolute Key (see here), and if there’s one thing we’ve come to expect is to not have expectations. Straddling an amorphous no man’s land between industrial, experimental electronics and black metal, one album will usually bear little resemblance to the next.
And yet, as we’ve immersed ourselves into Absolute Key’s material, an abstract essence makes itself known. It’s something that’s hard to put into words. There’s always a sort of otherworldly, esoteric essence to the music. Sometimes dark and oppressive, sometimes almost dreamy. But always Absolute Key reaches for something beyond the corporeally profane and banal.
Compared to the albums we’ve reviewed before, Ei meidän kotimme presents one more facet of Absolute Key’s sound. This is an industrial album through and through, eschewing all of the black metal elements to be found on Sundust (review) and The Third Level Of Decay (review). Instead, Ei meidän kotimme immerses itself fully in noisier textures.
This means tortured electronics and suffering junk metal, shrill feedback, rumbling low frequencies and crackling distortion. Warbling, wobbling loops of processed noise. Glitching, broken sounds of equipment groaning under abuse. At least on paper, the whole nine yards of harsh industrial electronics.
But, and no one acquainted with Absolute Key will be surprised by this, not only that. The more traditional elements of noise are complemented with atmospheric layers of processed human voices, borrowed melodies and plenty of disconcerting ambience. I’m assuming there’s a heavy use of found sounds and field recordings.
This all results in an album that is, in comparison to previous releases we’ve reviewed, harsher. But it still emphasizes atmosphere over extremity. Verily, I can repeat a phrase I often use: industrial noise is an inherently extreme genre of music, but in that spectrum, this isn’t overly extreme. Even moments of blaring distortion and noise are subservient to the atmosphere.
And what are those atmospheres?
Well, the art design with cut outs from old photos of people and buildings, the people with their eyes eerily covered, lends the album a decidedly ghostly angle. And apparently, according to what both the label and the artist himself has said about the album, this is not very far off. Ei meidän kotimme is an album of deep alienation, of even hostile strangeness. It’s a haunted house, but it’s not ghosts trapped in their own suffering haunting the place. No, these are the ghosts of old memories warped and corrupted, the rose tinted glasses of nostalgia removed to reveal the bleak truth behind those beautiful childhood memories. These are phantoms mercilessly saying: “You do not belong. You have made yourself a stranger. Leave!”
These are the haunting messages we hear in the buried murmurations and susurrations, in the warped pseudo-melodies and the distorted drones of the album. And perhaps there is a deeper symbolism here as well, an allegory in the spectral atmospheres. The back cover of the digipak, featuring cut-ups from philosophy texts, seemingly hints in this direction.
Ei meidän kotimme is an impressive album, and one I’d say has a surprisingly wide appeal despite it’s rather niché musical form. I mean, typically, noise based music is for the few and select. But due to both the emphasis on and the strength of its atmospheres, Ei meidän kotimme reaches well beyond that compartment.
In other words, if noise as a musical descriptor isn’t your cuppa, but you do listen to stuff like (dark) ambient and other forms of usually more atmospheric forms of electronics, or if you’re a sucker for that old haunted manor atmosphere, this might be for you.
At any rate, Ei meidän kotimme comes with our warmest recommendations. As can be read in the previous reviews here on ODIR, we’ve liked the other albums. This one we like even more.
Only Death Is Real 