Milli Tonverka by Einoma (VFORM031CD)

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Einoma (the alias of Icelandic duo Bjarni and Steindor), apparently can’t get no respect. BBC Music Online recently put together a rather extensive review of the Reykjavik music scene (“Reykjavik Underground”), and unless my tired old eyes deceived me, Einoma (and its constituent parts) didn’t even rate a mention. And yet their second full-length CD on Vertical Form is, like its predecessor Undir Feilnotum, an adventurous and fresh take on glitch techno, and a worthy addition to any cutting edge techno collection. Percussion and rhythm is Einoma’s strength – both the sampling and the programming. Their sampling has a characteristic cold industrial sound, but the ambience is brooding rather than confrontational. Clanking chains, water pipes, old steam radiators and other metallic and or watery sounds come to mind, along with vague impressions of things being ripped and twisted. These organic sounds are nicely integrated with a more purely electronic vocabulary of twitters, squeaks and thumps. Rhythmically, Einoma straddles a line between heavy-handed 4/4 industrial excess and stuttering stop ‘n’ start abstraction; they’re too variable and complex to qualify as IDM or anything else that would find a place on the dancefloor, but you can follow them (usually) without a score(card), and sometimes they kick into a legitimate toe-tapping groove. In other words, they’re somewhat to the left of Orbital, and somewhat to the right of Autechre at its most extreme, i.e., certainly not predictable and not always easy to follow, but rhythmically grounded nonetheless. The most noticeable difference between this release and their last effort is a greater use of synthesizer drones and, on one piece, ethereal wailing from a female vocalist. The increased use of the drones (and the insertion of an occasional melodic fragment) doesn’t exactly transport Einoma into a warm and fuzzy new age world, but it does tend to temper their brittle austerity, replacing alien otherness with a more open-ended sense of mystery. Whether or not you regard this as an improvement or a loss of focus will depend upon your musical tastes, but both this new CD and their previous one are well worth acquiring – even if no one seems willing to create (let alone jump on) an Einoma bandwagon.