Description
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“Cleaning Tape” is a musique concrète or industrial ambient album whose sound material is sourced entirely from vacuum-cleaning at home. It’s already the second piece by Mika Taanila that seems to describe the human condition during the pandemic but was in fact started long before it (the first one is his short film “Failed Emptiness. Time” from 2021).
The subject matter is typical Taanila: humans and technology, from the grand to the absurd, as perhaps most famously laid out in his documentary feature film “Return of the Atom” (2015, co-directed with Jussi Eerola). This time the tone is, however, optimistic or even empowering. The repetitive monotony of work is transformed via audio effects and re-imagined as something endlessly fascinating and kaleidoscopically beautiful.
Sonically and compositionally “Cleaning Tape” has similarities to the 1980’s post-punk ambient music of Bruce Gilbert and Dome, who influenced Taanila’s early tape loop pieces recorded in mid-80’s with Helsinki’s post-punk cult hero Harri S. Tuominen. “Cleaning Tape” started, indeed, as a tape loop installation titled “Cleaning Tapes” (2015), but the sonic approach of the installation was strictly documentary, with the vacuum cleaner sounds used untreated, as in many of his earlier found footage films such as “The Zone of Total Eclipse” (2006), whose accidentally recorded soundtrack, containing sounds of 1940’s astronomical measuring devices, practically overshadowed the main attraction – images from scientific documentation footage.
“Stimulus Progression”, Taanila’s 2014 vinyl EP consisting of urban field recordings of background music – or Muzak – playing in public places, was a first tentative step in the direction of musique concrète. Some of the documentary material was now subtly treated with effects twisting and warping the audio vérité. For the multi-channel audio installation “Plastic Heart” (2017) he recorded sounds of machines in a plastics factory, which were then further layered and bent in a computer. Unlike these works, “Cleaning Tape” was edited and treated by Taanila alone without outside production help, and the results are bolder and laser-sharp in focus. Perfect temporal editing can be expected from a seasoned film director and video editor; fittingly, the whole audio editing process of the album took place in a mainstream video software.
According to Taanila, the audio treatments on “Cleaning Tape” are the result of him experimenting with one software effect after another without understanding how they function – which resembles the post-punk DIY modus operandi of his first artistic identity as a teen proto-Noise prodigy in the early 1980’s under the pseudonym Musiikkivyöry. It has taken a while, but this work really matches the vision and intensity of Musiikkivyöry’s cassette albums. The cover image of “Cleaning Tape” appears to be a calendar of household chores and the track titles are similarly mundane (“Hallway”, “Living Room”, “Under the Chairs”), while Musiikkivyöry’s cassette sleeves showed Taanila’s family at a kitchen table and himself at a school dance; yet again there’s an almost unbearable contradiction between this and the music’s drama and tension.
Mika Taanila: Cleaning Tape (C50)
A:
1. Eteinen – Hallway (10:41)
2. Olohuone – Living Room (5:55)
3. Hankalat patterit – Tricky Radiators (7:08)
B:
1. Lattialistat – Baseboards (13:09)
2. Tuolien alta – From Under the Chairs (9:26)
Viikkosiivouksen kotiäänityksiä. Elektroninen käsittely, ei muita instrumentteja.
Domestic recordings of weekly vacuum-cleaning at home. Electronic post-processing, no additional instruments.
Helsinki 2015/2021
masterointi / mastering: Jussi Lehtisalo
kannet / cover art: Tomi Leppänen
