Grunt / Gelsomina - 2025 - ST 2xCD

 

Freak Animal Records – FA-CD-173  728.54MB FLAC

The first disc of Grunt / Gelsomina sounds like two people discovering how much violence can be packed into a shared room. The second sounds like that room being reopened twenty years later and filled with the accumulated debris of an entire noise culture. This self-titled double CD is therefore more than a reissue with bonus material. It is a before-and-after study of collaboration itself: one disc preserving Mikko Aspa and Pekka Perä-Takala’s original 2005 encounter, the other returning to the same partnership through contributions from twenty artists in 2025. The gap between them is long enough for equipment, methods and reputations to change, but the central attraction remains primitive and immediate. Grunt and Gelsomina make noise that feels handled, struck, dragged and forced into shape rather than merely switched on.

The cover establishes that physical vocabulary without resorting to the customary parade of atrocity photographs, medical damage or political provocation. Its black-and-white images show rough forest ground, broken branches, exposed roots, stones and a severed or fallen trunk. The lettering is small enough to look almost stamped onto the photograph. Nothing announces itself with theatrical grandeur. The land appears dense, wet and difficult to cross. It is nature stripped of pastoral calm, reduced to bark, dirt, splinters and irregular surfaces. The photograph has nearly the same visual behavior as the music: too much texture, too little open space, and no clean route through the material.

Grunt began in Finland in 1993 and gradually developed from harsh noise into a broader language containing power electronics, industrial construction, field recordings, acoustic sound and unusually deliberate editing. Mikko Aspa’s work has rarely treated noise as one undifferentiated block. Even at its most overloaded, Grunt depends upon contrasts: dry scrape against swollen distortion, an isolated object against a full electronic surge, documentary fragments against apparently abstract sound. Gelsomina, the project of Pekka Perä-Takala, belongs to the same Finnish tradition but has always carried its own feverish character. Releases such as Disease With a Purpose, issued by Freak Animal in 2004, and Cronenberg / Dead Music Live demonstrated a style in which harsh electronics could feel simultaneously crude, obsessive and strangely mobile.

Their 2005 collaboration appeared at precisely the point when Finnish harsh noise was becoming impossible to reduce to a few notorious names or a single recognizable sound. The scene had accumulated its own labels, live circuits, private methods and internal arguments. Freak Animal was central to that development, not merely documenting Finnish noise but helping define its physical and conceptual standards. Small editions, severe presentation and uncompromising material were expected, but sameness was not. The strongest recordings had to prove that familiar ingredients could still be arranged with individual pressure and purpose.

The original Grunt / Gelsomina LP did exactly that. It did not attempt to combine two projects by politely preserving each artist’s signature in alternating sections. There is little sense of one participant standing back while the other demonstrates a technique. The recording behaves as a collision in which ownership becomes difficult to assign. Feedback, contact microphones, metal, broken signals and dense electronic movement enter a shared system. Sounds are not introduced as recognizable instruments and then processed. They often arrive already damaged, as though the recording began after the equipment had been dropped, overloaded or contaminated.

Its force comes from constant internal friction. Harsh noise can become strangely restful when saturation is too uniform. Once every frequency has been filled, the ear accepts the mass and begins treating it as weather. Grunt and Gelsomina avoid that condition by refusing to let the surface stabilize. The first disc repeatedly alters its grain. Thick distortion breaks apart into sharper fragments. Lower mechanical pressure is invaded by high electronic squeal. Scraping textures appear close enough to suggest direct contact with a microphone, then disappear beneath broader surges. The noise remains severe, but severity is never confused with standing still.

There is a workshop quality to much of the material, although “workshop” sounds too orderly for the environment being created. Objects seem to be tested for their capacity to resist. Metal complains under pressure. Surfaces are rubbed until their texture becomes rhythm. Short impacts puncture longer electronic layers without settling into a beat. Cables and connections appear to function at the edge of failure, producing bursts that feel less like composed gestures than systems violently correcting themselves. Yet the apparent disorder is shaped with care. The artists know when to crowd the recording and when to remove enough material for one damaged sound to become enormous.

The distinction between noise and power electronics is useful here only up to a point. Grunt has long worked within both fields, while Gelsomina has frequently carried the hostile concentration associated with power electronics even when vocals and explicit narrative are absent. The 2005 collaboration does not require shouted slogans to create confrontation. Its aggression is embedded in the treatment of sound. Frequencies are forced against each other. Dynamics change without warning. Repetition offers no comfort because repeated actions continue accumulating abrasion. The listener is not addressed by a human voice, but the music still feels directed rather than impersonal.

That sense of intention separates the disc from casual improvisation. Grunt and Gelsomina may use unstable processes, but they do not simply document whatever happened when the machines were activated. Sections possess distinct densities and shapes. Material returns in altered form. A sound that initially functions as background may later become the central pressure point. Harsh passages are made harsher by the spaces carved around them. The editing preserves spontaneity while refusing to surrender judgment. What sounds uncontrolled has been selected because its particular loss of control matters.

Twenty years later, recreating that original encounter would have been the least interesting option. Both artists had already changed, and the scene surrounding them had multiplied into several generations of Finnish noise. The second disc answers that problem by changing the structure of the collaboration. Instead of asking Grunt and Gelsomina to imitate their younger selves, it brings twenty additional artists into the process. The old two-person collision becomes a distributed organism. Sources pass through different hands, accumulating techniques, equipment and sensibilities that did not occupy the original recording in the same way.

This could easily have produced a compilation disguised as a collaboration, with each participant arriving long enough to leave a recognizable calling card. Instead, the second disc is most compelling when identities dissolve. A source may carry the blunt physicality associated with object-based industrial noise, then be swallowed by feedback, granular damage or an engulfing low-frequency mass. Handmade electronics coexist with more complex processing without creating a sterile divide between “old” and “new” technology. The methods differ, but everything is drawn toward the same rough center.

The twenty-year concept is not presented as a museum anniversary. There is no attempt to polish the 2005 material into respectable historical importance or prove that the original LP secretly predicted every later development. The new disc behaves more like uncontrolled regrowth over an abandoned site. Different forms have appeared, but the ground underneath remains recognizable. Finnish noise still values crude materials, physical action, unstable machinery and the individual character of damaged sound. What has expanded is the number of ways those values can be organized.

The contrast between the discs reveals how the meaning of “harsh” has changed. On the original recording, harshness often comes from direct conflict between a relatively limited number of elements. One scrape, one frequency or one overloaded signal can dominate the field. The 2025 material is more likely to produce harshness through multiplication. Layers enter from multiple sources, carrying different acoustic fingerprints and recording spaces. The violence becomes social. It is the sound of many private practices being compressed until they create one public pressure.

Despite that expansion, the second disc avoids becoming a smooth digital collage. Its seams remain useful. Changes in resolution, room tone and saturation expose the fact that the material traveled. One contribution may sound close, dry and physical; the next may open into wider electronic depth. Rather than correcting these differences, the construction uses them as movement. The recording keeps changing rooms while maintaining the sensation that every room belongs to the same damaged building.

The strongest moments occur when the listener can no longer determine whether a sound began as an object, an instrument or electronic interference. A metallic vibration stretches until it resembles synthesis. Feedback develops a granular surface that could be stone dragged across concrete. Low oscillation shakes loose a series of smaller impacts. What initially resembles wind may be friction, faulty amplification or heavily processed field material. This uncertainty is not a decorative mystery. It places attention back on the sound’s behavior. Origin matters less than pressure, duration, texture and the way one element deforms another.

Grunt’s long experience with composition becomes especially important across such a crowded project. Aspa has often worked against the assumption that harsh noise should be captured as one spontaneous blast. His recordings can be painstakingly assembled from live action, acoustic sources, electronics and material collected over long periods. The second disc benefits from that architectural sense. Its mass is not merely stacked. Sounds are given different depths. Some appear immediately against the listener’s face; others remain buried, exerting force without fully revealing themselves. The mix becomes a vertical excavation through layers of accumulated damage.

Gelsomina supplies another kind of instability. Perä-Takala’s work has often possessed a nervous, corrosive energy, with sounds that appear to chew through their own structures. The project’s name, borrowed from the central character of Federico Fellini’s La Strada, creates an odd contrast with the music. Fellini’s Gelsomina is vulnerable, expressive and trapped inside a brutal world. The noise project offers no literal adaptation of that character, yet its best work also joins fragility to punishment. Thin frequencies bend without disappearing. Small gestures survive inside overwhelming systems. Sensitivity is not the opposite of violence here. It is what makes violence register.

The forest imagery begins to feel more precise as the double album unfolds. A forest floor is not a clean natural system viewed from a scenic distance. It is decomposition in continuous operation. Fallen material becomes habitat. Roots break through older remains. Moisture, rot and growth occupy the same surfaces. The two discs function similarly. The 2005 recording does not sit beneath glass as a completed historical object. It becomes the ground from which the 2025 collaboration grows, while the newer material remains full of the earlier record’s broken textures.

There is also something distinctly Finnish in the refusal to make the anniversary sentimental. Twenty years could invite testimonials, congratulatory language or a ceremonial restatement of past achievement. Grunt / Gelsomina answers with more abrasion. The tribute to endurance is not a speech about endurance. It is evidence that the work can still be activated, complicated and made dangerous. The participating artists do not gather to praise an untouchable classic. They enter the material and leave marks on it.

The double-CD format gives this relationship room to remain legible. Combining both eras onto one disc would have turned the original recording into a preface. Separating them allows the 2005 collaboration to retain its own scale and atmosphere before the larger anniversary construction begins. The listener can hear the first disc as a complete statement, pause, and then encounter the second as an answer produced under entirely different conditions. The package becomes a hinged object: two panels connected by names, methods and history, but opening toward different forms of pressure.

Compact disc also suits the project’s density. Vinyl gave the original collaboration an appropriate physical presence, but CD permits the roughest frequency combinations to arrive without the compromises imposed by groove width and side length. The material can sustain extended low pressure, sharp upper-range activity and abrupt transitions without turning the object into an oversized box. The digipak preserves the black-and-white severity of the original visual world while housing a project that has effectively doubled its historical reach.

What finally holds the set together is not nostalgia, nationality or even extremity. It is a shared belief that noise remains meaningful when every sound has a specific physical consequence. Grunt and Gelsomina do not treat distortion as a ready-made genre surface. They treat it as material that must be pushed, divided, crowded, starved and reshaped. The twenty collaborators extend that labor without cleaning it up. Across both discs, sound retains the resistance of matter.

The 2005 recording captures two artists meeting through impact. The 2025 disc demonstrates what happens when that impact is allowed to echo through a community for two decades. One is concentrated and combative; the other is sprawling, layered and collective. Neither cancels the other. Together they show continuity without repetition, history without embalming, and collaboration without polite compromise.

The fallen tree on the cover is therefore not simply dead scenery. It is a structure returning to the ground while other systems form around it. Grunt / Gelsomina works the same way. The original LP remains intact, but it is no longer isolated. Twenty years of Finnish noise have grown across its surface, entered its fractures and carried its methods elsewhere. When the second disc ends, the project does not feel concluded. It feels scattered again: metal, feedback, broken glass, machines and private obsessions thrown back into the forest, waiting for somebody to disturb them.