ILPO VÄISÄNEN was one indivisible, inseparable half of Panasonic / Pan Sonic, a crucial and visionary duo in electronic music that was started in the beginning of the 1990s.

They trekked through new possibilities in sound, timbre and structure, in a field which covered all the knowledge that interested them: political, philosophical, cultural – human. Musically speaking, and from the viewpoint of the prevalent vocabularies, they mixed techno with the spirit of the most caustic rock, with dub, and the most enlightened side of what was generally known as industrial.

Ilpo Väisänen, born in Kuopio / Finland in 1963, studied visual arts and ceramics, graduated from Turku art academy in 1991. He formed the performance-art group ultra3 in 1991 and in 1993, together with Mika Vainio, the sound group sinO which turned into Pan Sonic (originally called Panasonic). In a musical form in which sequencing and recording music using computers is standard, the group was known for recording everything live, straight to DAT (Digital Audio Tape) using home-made and modified synthesizers and effect units. In December 2009 their split was announced, Ilpo and Mika continued with their own solo projects and other collaborations.

Ilpo Väisänen returned to solo albums through now canonical Editions Mego in 2015 with ‘Communist Dub’, ‘I-LP-O in Dub’ in 2017, and last year’s larger album, ‘ÄÄNET’, in honour of his late friend. Peppered with some field recordings from a Pan Sonic tour of the USA, this album makes for a dignified, powerful and delicate elegy.

Ilpo’s former releases on his own label Kangaroo, a sub-label of Raster-Noton, have clearly shown his personal affinity with dub music. He often released records under his alias I-LP-O In Dub.

In order to generate his sounds and soundscapes Ilpo Väisänen rarely uses more than the simplest of devices: analog keyboards and other oscillators he’s fabricated himself. In an age of digital ubiquities, his economy of means and anachronistic aura almost constitutes a challenge, indeed a provocation.

One discovers this postulate within the solo releases that Väisänen has issued since 1995. His world permanently fluctuates between hot and cold; composed of creaks, whistles, strange noises and rhythmic improbabilities. It’s a world oftentimes futuristic, yet prehistoric.