IBM The Oval Recording (Mego) lp + 7" 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
So Mika Vainio and Ilpo Vaisanen have picked another mega-corporation to name a sound project after. The precedent was Panasonic who demanded that the Finns change their name, with Pan Sonic being the permutation of the offending moniker. Of course, Vainio & Vaisanen's argument here will be that IBM is nothing more than an acronym for Ilpo, Bruce, Mika (the Bruce being Bruce Gilbert from Wire), but they've appropriated the IBM corporate logo, thus abolishing any artistic propriety they may have in the matter... Sure this Mego release will certainly be such small pressing (it's vinyl only, too) as to not even show up on IBM's legal radar. But if this project continues and gets signed to Mute / Blast First, their name too will likely get altered. Personally, I'm hoping for MIB, but then Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones will be on their case.
The self-naming crisis aside, the collaboration between Ilpo Vaisanen, Mika Vainio, and Bruce Gilbert is a triumphant one, but one that is far from the crystalline sounds that have dominated the Pan Sonic aesthetic. The turntable appears to be the original source for these recordings, for which the trio has forced locked grooves onto already mangled pieces of vinyl and then manipulated the resulting sounds through a variety of computer generated effects (lots of pitch shifting, flange, and digital-crunch distortion). "The Oval Recording" (another play with names as it was recorded in The Oval Mansion across from the Oval cricket arena in London) has nothing to do with the clean digital fragmentation of Oval - this is a dissonant rumbling album which rides a thick wall of industrial strength fuzz before diving into an Earth / Sunn like low end rumble. There's just as much Non and Otomo Yoshihide as there is Pita and Fennesz on the first.