EVERY GENRE PROJECT - August 29 - Suomisaundi

Genre of the Day - Suomisaundi

Album of the Day - My CD Has Landed on the Next Door Neighbours Dog by PeLinPala (1999)

In this column, we’ve observed a few countries that exist outside of the context of nationhood and the musical idiosyncrasies this produces in this column. Though Finland does have the pride of being a full-fledged nation—a status hard-won through a series of contentions through Russia on its doorstep, a front that still produces conflicts today—it still possesses a certain outsider charm amidst its Scandinavian siblings. This is in part owed to its accent-spotted language that lies in a small linguistic family, peppered with mind-bendingly long words and daunting grammar, perhaps correlates to a musical environment predicated on unique absurdities in the world of Suomisaundi. 

Suomisaundi is the country’s branch of psytrance EDM-freakouts speaking to northern Europe’s yearning for warmth. As a nation reputed for inhospitable frigidity, it’s no wonder that flights to fairer climates are out the wazoo. India’s tropical paradise Goa has long offered European hippies the chance to escape the cold and indulge in music that bridges the most absurd aspects of hippie culture with unhinged electronic, on-vacation experimentation. Perhaps the insular nature of Finnish culture and the countercultural instincts railing against the quaint and orderly nature of Scandinavian life, often cited as a positive by outsiders and bristled at by artists who live there, led to Finnish producers going absolutely haywire when holiday-goers imported the sounds back home. 

Suomisaundi dispenses with the few limiting factors in an already wonky musical space such as rhythmic consistency for something that mimics the irreverence of Finnish drinking culture. That cheeky charm has won fans beyond Finland who resonate with its cartoonish, ever-surprising visions of psytrance as a welcome departure from the perhaps overwhelming colors of typical psytrance, like a trip taken with your least serious and most adventurous friend. Accentuating these elements includes references to the speedy Finnish foxtrot offshoot humppa, crazed funk, cheap-sounding tracker instrumentation, and bewildering vocal samples. As is a theme in frivolous electronic experimentation, recession looms at the outset of suomisaundi’s story: Finland went through a deep recession in the early ‘90s, so carefree escapism was musically inevitable.

PeLinPala pushes the Roland 303, the defining instrument of acid trance, to limits so wild you might assume the machine exploded at the end of the recording process. The introduction in “Rikki Martin” is downright dastardly—squelching melodies and rhythms zip past each other with no ingrained fear of rhyme or reason. “Jazz Cabalero” uses wild-abandon saxophone riffs thrown into a blender of dissonance, speed, and off-the-rails cartoonishness. “Lights, atoms & Molecules” is a genuinely delectable thump lightened by frog-like synthesized choirs, a delirious acid techno dream that’s hard to shake even when you emerge out of its grip. If this album and trying to read even one sentence of Finnish (Minä haluaisin että tulet häihimme. —“I would like you to come to our wedding.”) is your only impression of the country, you may feel that you’ve been abducted by psytrance-loving aliens—it’s best to surrender and enjoy the ride.