Approximately Boundless

You're seemingly more likely to encounter the Finnish underground in some dusty dive in East London than in Helsinki. Few artists on labels such as Fonal or Ektro seem to do many gigs in Finland, aside from a few sporadic appearances, and even people into folk/psychedelia in the country tend not to know much about them. Meanwhile, cheap air fares from Finland to the UK have ferried such acts to London on a regular basis. Musically it's a fantastic arrangement for us, although a paradoxical one.

On my last trip to Finland I finally found these artists' work on their home soil – in a museum. The Finnish Design Museum was running a New Nordic Design exhibition, a rather wide and woolly selection of works of which the Finnish underground stuff was certainly the most original. Paavoharju, the group who put the 'freak' into 'freakfolk', had built a strange DIY shelter filled with empty beer cans, magazines and homebrewed alcohol – like a makeshift den in the woods transposed into an pristine exhibition space. Islaja, meanwhile, had a Super-8 type film of darkened woods and the outdoors, her face flashing into frame in the torchlight – a highly evocative bit of work, somewhere between Margaret Tait and The Blair Witch Project.

It's a bit dispiriting that the 'wildness' of the Finnish underground has itself become a kind of commodity to the design world, and that it should be encountered in a museum, the precise antithesis of the kind of naturalness that's the inspiration for good Finnish DIY stuff. For me, the obvious platform for Finnish underground music would be outdoor gigs, something that's extremely popular over there. Considering how much blandly pseudo-academic outdoor sound art there seems to get art funding, surely there's space for Kemialliset Ystävät to play a gig on an island by a Finnish lake, or Lau Nau or Islaja to do their wood-folk thing actually in a wood? Maybe someday.

For now, events like the Approximately Infinite Universe tour, which has just completed a successful UK tour, selling out at the ICA, will have to do.

Cocaine rap blues

A new album in the office from the Re-Up Gang, the Clipse affiliated hiphop project. Cocaine rap is the hole this stuff gets pigeoned into, and the sleeve is predictably dusted with white powder. Despite, or perhaps because of, the lack of supposedly serious content, the lyrical form is often that much more impressive – shorn of conventional narrative and characterisation, the syllables and rhymes become super tight (you don't get many couplets like "I still feel belittled sittin' here spittin' riddles/Amongst clown ass rappers who tend to give me the giggles" anymore)

Nonetheless, I was devastated this week when one Clipse rhyme turned out to be not half as imaginative as I'd built it up to be. One of their rhymes started off something like "just waking up in the mondrian". Amazing, I thought, this line which subtitutes the almost-soundalike "mondrian" for "morning", thus giving this vivid feel of the primary colouredness of a really bright, burningly intense morning sun.

Turns out The Mondrian is a hotel. Indeed, the late Pimp C of UKG was actually found dead there.

"High"

American artist and musician (and bandmate with Mike Kelley in The Poetics) Tony Oursler recently opened an exhibition at the Lisson Gallery in London. The show, which runs until October 3rd, features a mixture of his work from the 90's along with new work from this year, if you're familiar with Oursler's art then there won't be many surprises for you, but it's still well worth a visit. Using sculpture, painting, video projection and sound, Oursler combines a hand-made DIY aesthetic with images of obsessive habits such as chain smoking, internet addiction and compulsive gambling along with the sound of indistinct mumblings and sharp angry whispers. Wandering through the darkened galleries as the emanations from each work overlap with one another creates a sense of being in a space of conflict and psychological violence; as if caught up in an argument between a roomful of tatty puppets, disembodied heads and ghostly voices. This, along with the recurring image of smoking cigarettes and loops of neurotic reorganisation, creates a feeling of haggard claustrophobia as if afflicted with the cabin fever caused by sitting in front of a computer for far too long, exacerbated by the effects of nicotine withdrawal. Although this sounds somewhat distressing, the effect of being immersed within and jostled about by his work is a satisfying type of sensorial overload, even sometimes fun as the repetition and knee-jerk compulsiveness of the pieces become ridiculous.

minimal markets

Can't remember which album it was of the many that cross my desk, but it was weird to see a shout-out on a fairly mainstream dance release recently expressing solidarity with those who have been sticking with it through "tough times in the last year" – presumably a reference to the economic climate. It's a strange idea to me that the perceived success or otherwise of a music venture should be predicated on such a fickle factor as economic confidence. This may have been just an aside on an inside sleeve of an album, but it seems to acknowledge that this is first or foremost a business venture, that they are speculating to accumulate.

When I first used to glance at the credits, acknowledgments and copyright info on CD sleeves, I imagined more of a cottage industry model, where the names that were namechecked were simply those responsible for getting those notes in the air and sticking them on a 5" silvery plastic disc. There was no reference to the prevailing economic conditions, any more than a football team would talk about the international markets when buying a star striker. Obviously the economic outlook for a lot of labels is poor at the moment – and it's obviously the small labels we should worry about – but referencing the international electronica market in your album sleeve seems a bit like a great painter blaming poor weather for a rather dour set of canvases.

Silt Deposit

The reactivation of the Siltbreeze label has brightened up the office this year. Tom Lax, the boss of the label, brought his evidently bottomless 7" record bag to the WFMU studios recently. The fluff build up on the needle reaches dangerously high levels at points, but it's essential listening if you want to reach the dark, fuzzy place they're coming from.

This Is The End

I'm pretty melancholy to see The End nightclub is to close. Unusually for this kind of news, it's not a financially dictated decision – the management just feel that after 15 years they want to move on.

For those who don't know The End, it's down a dead end alley in central London. Once you're in and down the main staircase, there's a bar on one side and the main room on the other. But the main room isn't a large open space – it's divided by a central partition into two long tunnels, and with the lights from the DJ end rather dim at the far end of the room, you can feel completely lost in the gloom down there. You're never submerged into a large crowd because of the way the room is divided up, you just feel scattered amongst small groups of ravers. At the back of the room is a second set of speakers, so even if you can't see the DJ, you get a full, primal blast of whatever he's playing. So you're both physically disconnected and totally plugged into the music.

For me the effect of being in a rave has always had a kind of fight or flight psychology; you face the DJ, because you feel a bit exposed if you don't, and you feel totally switched on, attuned to the space. The End was great because the space felt so complex and fluid, it didn't feel like you were just in a crowd. Every space in the crowd felt particular. If there was a subtle sense of chaos there, but the music was always fiercely strong. I remember DJ Krust playing "Warhead" down there, and the bass felt like the roof was going to lift off. In later years, dubstep and Grime events have been pretty terrific, too.

It's strange to reminisce about The End and compare these thoughts to a recent Resident Advisor list of The Top 100 Clubs In The World. Although I appreciated the sentiment of the list, to have somewhere so impersonal and physically intimidating as Fabric at number two just seemed to miss what's special about the dance music experience, ie the subjective, personal space that can be created in a nightclub.