Uton
What On Earth Are We Doing Here
UK CHEESES INTERNATIONAL CI18 CD (2024)
Uton is Jani Hirvonen of Tampere, Finland. We used to hear a few LPs from this uncategorisable fellow around 2009-2010, sometimes in collaboration with Jüppala Kääpiö, Jari K, and others, and he also did the cover art to records by Hevoset and Nthnth Sthsth. But I appreciate we were only hearing the merest suggestion of his output. As Uton he’s made at least 100 full-length releases since 2001, and there are many collaborative projects to his name including Bringers of the Dawn, Last Night on Earth, and My Bizarre Bayuk.
My impression from previous hearings is that Jani Hirvonen is a compulsive overdubber who doesn’t know when to quit, layering performances together into a delirious psychedelic swirl in hopes of a lysergic result. Today’s record is similarly oriented, reaching even higher extremes with cosmic freakery and intensity on these 2022-23 recordings make in Turku. At one time it might have been convenient to align Uton with “Finnish Folk”, a journalistic invention not unlike “New Weird America”, which covered a lot of the music coming from the Finnish underground from the mid-1990s onward; one of the more prominent successes was Kemialliset Ystävät, but they also blended free improvisation and psychedelia into their mostly-acoustic music with its odd song forms and highly idiosyncratic reimaginings of the history of free music. Even the use of the word “Folk” in this unhelpful term implied that we would be hearing songs and acoustic guitars and recorders, none of which was necessarily true. I mention this as today’s album What On Earth Are We Doing Here is mostly electronic (as far as I can make out), and its murky dimensions seem to be underpinned by queasy synth gloop, even as wayward guitars and fragile percussion are inserted into the upper layers, possibly joined by treated and distorted field recordings.
If any of this heightens Jani Hirvonen’s status as an electro-acoustic composer of some sort, it’s also fair to say that there is a good deal of spontaneity and instant-invention in his benign and balmy works, which is the only way I can account for the formless nature of these drifty sprawls. That’s not intended as a negative comment, and indeed the open-ended structure may bring the listener closer to the sort of enlightenment and epiphany which is suggested by titles like ‘An Astounding Notion’ and ‘The Knowledge of the Hidden Ages’. I shan’t say that hearing this record will open the collective third eye of the audience, but a bit of me believes we do sometimes need to work our way out of traditional, logic-based thinking, and this is just the sort of music to help you do it – inserting a rubber screwdriver into your brain, with the most benevolent of intentions. Six examples of Jani Hirvonen’s colourful and charming artworks can be found on the panels of this release, likewise collaged and layered and psychedelic, and promising the revelation of hidden beauties.
Steve Fricker is the English fellow behind this label and distribution channel of the same name, which began in the early 1990s and used to feature a good deal of hard-edged electronic noise for its earliest releases. I think we last heard from them in 2003 with A Marble Holder From Andover, credited to Onomatopoeia (a Fricker alias); as I recall produced largely by tape collage, which might be one area where he overlaps with Uton. From 10 April 2024. Available in the UK from Cold Spring.