Year: 2025
Label: Freak Animal
Often, when I’m reviewing noise, I’m thinking: why? What’s the point? Noise is… well, noise. And I don’t mean that in the sense that it’s all just mindless cacophony and who in their right mind listens to that stuff.
What I mean is that ultimately, a lot of harsh noise sounds quite alike, and both the exercise of trying to futilely find words to describe extremely abstract and often destructuralized music, and evaluating the “goodness” of music that more or less consciously seeks to escape such assessments seem quite pointless to me.
But futility hasn’t stopped us before, so here we go. Again, as we delve into Rautakymi’s debut. Rautakymi is a fresh face in the Finnish harsh noise scene, with only a few tapes and some compilation appearances to their name prior to this album.
Listening to Ei tästä maailmasta, one isn’t surprised by how fast things have moved for Rautakymi. Entirely contradicting what I said above about the futility of assessing the “goodness” of harsh noise, I’m calling this very good. And, whilst using many very tried and true elements from the standard harsh noise toolbox, Ei tästä maailmasta has some genuine character of its own.
So yeah, on one hand this is blaring noise, grinding cacophony, distorted crackling audial rust and the whole nine yards of harsh noise. Blaring, abrasive walls of sound that are wont to degrade into crumbling chaos from time to time.
But on the other hand, here and there Rautakymi choose to dial down the all-out, full blast blaring cacophony for moments of what, in a harsh noise context, might even be called a sense of subtlety.
A couple of examples. Halfway through Kymijoen pohjassa I, the all-encompassing wall of noise dies down, leaving a focal layer of feedback whine, under which what I can only describe as a total collapse of all mechanical, electronic sound takes place, prolongedly. Tieteen rajat tulevat vastaan, into which Rautakymi eases with a lengthy movie sample, uses its three-minute length to slowly, gradually build up an increasingly violent, loud and noisy soundscape, where atmosphere is slowly replaced by rusty blades in the listener’s ear.
On the whole, though, Ei tästä maailmasta runs the gamut of primitive harsh noise. First track The Kuusankoski Incident leads in with shrill, piercing feedback which abruptly turns to low, churning, violent noise. In other words, from the go, friends of harsh noise will know the lay of the land. The moments mentioned above are welcome details in a familiar topology.
Which in no way detracts from the album. In so many ways, this combination of a familiar, tried-and-tested foundation with the odd individuating detail here and there is so much more rewarding than all-out, full-on weirdness for weirdness’ sake. In approaching their craft this way, Rautakymi retain all of the cathartic, endlessly rewarding elements of straightforward, brutal, primitive harsh noise – but with a slight twist, a slight edge that keeps Ei tästä maailmasta from sinking into the stylistic gray mass.
Only Death Is Real 