Anton Nikkilä: "White Nights"

Label: N&B Research Digest
Release date: July 1, 2002
Promotion: Dense Communications
Available from M.DOS online mail order service


Anton Nikkilä's first solo release after 1998's critically acclaimed Formalist is full of samples and ideas borrowed from two of his long-time objects of fascination: classic Muzak and Soviet cult of technology.

"I became interested in Muzak Corporation through 1980's Industrial Music's attention to totalitarian control mechanisms, but soon realized how powerful and intriguing the 'classic Muzak' of 1970's is as music. I find its Gregorian-chant-like anonymity and emotional spectrum, universal (Western) familiarity and lack of 'artistic' drama intoxicating on a personal level. On a more general level, Muzak is a fine metaphor for a true everyday spirituality of mass consumer society."

"In the Soviet Union the cult of technology was part of the secular state ideology, which for many people had a religious function. It reached some of its peaks in the distant 1920's and 1930's, but also in the 1960's, which were the Soviet Union's last (and perhaps only) period of flowering - a time of techno-optimism, relative liberalism and relative well-being. Like Muzak-era's mass society, all this has now been forgotten, but I have found it compelling to look at these times and their culture, because they bring to light so starkly the current religion of techno-consumerism."

"There are unavoidably other, more personal levels in the music which may be more prevalent, and the historical allusions are presented in small doses and combined with oblique humour."

File under: Lyrical Noise, Elevator Noir, Transcendental Gabber and Imaginary Post-Techno Music of the Soviet Union.


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