Approximately Infinite Universe at ICA, 27 September 2008

Approximately Infinite Universe at ICA, 27 September 2008

02 October, 2008
by: Robin

My girlfriend really likes fish – both eating them and looking at them. So as it happens, I take her to the aquarium on the same day the UK-wide Approximately Infinite Universe series culminates in London. Organised by NO-FI and [no.signal], and finishing at the ICA, it engages Finnish musicians from the Fonal label in special collaborations with some notional US counterparts.

Maybe I've just seen too many underwater creatures, but the opening hook-up – Jan Anderzén's Kemialliset Ystävät and American violinist Karl Bauer, or Axolotl – distinctly seems to drop it Sea Life Centre-style. With his fiddle, Bauer likes to set up minimalism’s psychedelic effect with its occasional acquaintance psychedelic rock. This time it apparently happens several leagues under, on a chance meeting in a bathysphere. It's just one current in a huge cube of ocean, with glutinous bubble bass lurking at the bottom and drones breaking the surface.

At times the group get thinking too hard and supply formalism, but it's more often avoided with a cute touch, including more than a shade of 'Songs of the Humpack Whale' and even a strain of soft-rock balladry woven into the climax. They steer away from drippy pastoralism too, with fidgety data-chatter bringing to mind the electromagnetic junk that penetrates the planet.

Next, Fonal boss Sami Sänpäkkilä (who normally trades in fractured sound-and-folk manipulations as Es) joins with Philadelphia's Tara Burke for a rich slide-show of a set. Sänpäkkilä deploys a vividly fictional battery of sounds next to Burke's grippingly clear voice. Her miniature bells help place things in an imagined central Asia, along with a percussion track clanking like an entire caravan's collection of utensils. Fades into different material seem to move the scene elsewhere, for example westwards to find Burke cutting a nunnish figure, her chants joined by pipe organ that slowly folds and convolutes itself into knots.

A break for a film by Sänpäkkilä gives Tomutonttu and Skaters a chance to start from scratch. An impressively solid hum takes shape in the air thanks to the latter, while Tomutonttu acts up on vocals, playing a Floyd-esque pict in a cave (minus the furry animals). Skaters get stuck back in, messing him up with hard, polygonal pulses suggesting the sound of a brutal Bruce Parry hallucinogen. Unfortunately Tomutonttu's man is overwhelmed rather than enlightened, resorting to 'primal' wailing that's a little hard to swallow, while skaters ease into a drone that starts to feel much too strident. Worse, the whole sound seems boxed in compared to the easy expanse of Kemialliset Ystävät -- though it's possibly not the musicians' fault.

Islaja, Blevin Blectum and Samara Lubelski's closer has a triumphant air – fair enough, with tickets selling out to a doting audience – but it nearly fails to acknowledge the tour's fertility. They do combine well, but either songs are pure Islaja material, or she and Lubelski watch Blectum's (figurative) baton to closely. The encore, though, is pretty awesome, baffling classification either way and reminding everyone why it's been so successful.

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Robin