Lost / Recovered EP

On the sound of memory, and the memory of sound.

Sound and memory share the same intangible qualities – a commonality that often spells trouble. A smell evoked by a childhood memory, a childhood memory triggered by a sound – an ongoing chain of cause of effect, activating (and perhaps even fooling) all of our senses. Do we hear what we lived? Do we live what we heard? Is there even a difference?

By releasing Lost/Recovered, Ikävä Pii almost reluctantly revisits a time past, a different state of mind – and yes, one could argue that this spells trouble. But rather than avoiding trouble, why not acknowledge it, and embrace it?

Like a time-capsule, Ikävä Pii’s vinyl debut is a collection of three original songs, complemented with two recent remixes by Arif and Monty DJ. The three original works (Palau Figment, Rampage and La Conga Di Corto) are some of Ikävä Pii’s early productions – but were recovered in London between 2020 and 2021, to be released on Flippen Disks.

These retrieved songs present a slightly different version of Ikävä Pii’s musical self, especially when compared to recent releases on the Early Reflex label, or Ikävä’s own Too Much Information outlet. Somewhat more linear in composition, and focussing on continuity and flow rather than on abstraction and deconstruction, Lost/Recovered nonetheless has a place in Ikävä Pii’s sonic universe.

As the title of the EP indicates, the notion of lost sounds and recovered memories looms heavily over this project. We’re not only dealing here with sounds from a distant past, but also with childhood memories from much longer ago. Faded recollections from Puglia and Sardina, half-forgotten impressions of class and otherness, souvenirs of exoticism and mystification, processes of learning and unlearning, the synthesis of micro and macro – a sonic archive that is as much about nostalgia for the future as it is about the future of nostalgia.

The opener Palau Figment is a dive into this sonic archive right from the start. Its saturated, driving drum machine beat is hesitantly accompanied by floating synthesizer play and takes us right into dream-land, grounded by a mono bass line that throughout the song is joined by a doubling replica in stereo – a memory of itself if you will; A nostalgic narrative told by a hardly comprehensible voice. “Rampage” does a good job shredding it it right up, exposing the distortion of memory in its growing destruction of it’s driving force, the synthesized string sound that is eventually rendered nearly unrecognizable.

This painful process of acknowledgement finds its cathartic reconciliation on the flip. “La Conga di Corto” combines the tropes of the A-side into an ecstatic 5 minutes of loopy, shifty drums and broken up synthesizers. Arif’s Woo Reduction keeps it’s titles promise, taking few elements from the original track into a minimal club track that will make dancefloors pause and bounce alike. Monty DJ’s Transformation Dub is a much less minimalistic approach, stacking layers of percussion on top of each other, shifting form constantly.

As such, the EP represents a ripple in time. Past, present and future, colliding at the same moment, folding into each other. This clash can indeed be seen as troublesome – as creating disturbances, scratches, tears. But perhaps these are exactly the glitches that we need, to subtly (and sonically) shock us out of the continuum of familiarity in which we find ourselves locked so often. Memory, sound, trouble – three words, but a world of possibilities.