Text by Mikko Polus
The foreword of Special Interests #16 mentioned a change that has happened in underground culture, or more specifically in zine journalism, podcasts and other platforms where artists and their releases are discussed. It noted that whereas past fanzines focused on the then-active and even just recently started projects, the current documentation is much more focused on artists and projects that have already established their status and have become more or less well known scene names. This focus on past achievements also often comes with a longing for the better days or golden years of the past. In this past-oriented view the currently happening interesting things might end up entirely uncelebrated and undocumented, which, ironically, only strengthens the view that things were better in the past. It’s hard to argue with that, if the comparison is made with an increasingly documented and discussed past, and the current moment which is barely acknowledged to exist. Even the most recent history soon vanishes into oblivion due to lack of discussion, communication and lasting documentation.
Of course the above is a somewhat cynical exaggeration, but I hope people reading this understand the point behind it. The mentioned foreword came to my mind while I was writing a commentary about a recent tape that was published as an edition of just 30 copies, and thought that I’d like to ask the artist some questions about it… and quite soon started thinking “This is a tape many people can’t hear, and the project is just starting and has played just one or two gigs so far. What if the project ends before publishing something more widely available? Am I just wasting everyone’s time here talking about something they can’t experience firsthand?”. In the end, instead of letting imagined outside expectations dictate what I should write about, I decided I will bring up this tape anyway as I find it interesting and worth mentioning and discussing. For me, this tape is a part of the vital current moment, and something that cements my belief that the flood of interesting and high-quality noise of the recent years is far from over.
That said, while Iron Star is a new project, its maker has been in the scene for some years already. He makes noise under the name Atrophist and has organized plenty of noise gigs in the Helsinki area. Some of these Atrophist tapes were reviewed in issue #15 of Special Interests.
But let’s get on topic. Esoteric Pseudoscience is the debut release by Iron Star. It’s a C30 tape, and was self-published in early 2025 as an edition of 30 copies. Instead of the usual plastic case, the cassette is wrapped in a page of Stephen Wolfram’s book “A New Kind Of Science” that has the tape’s track list, contact information and numbering written on its inner side with a metallic marker. It doesn’t look like much, but for a self-published small-scale debut tape it’s not bad either. I am not familiar with the author, so any possible conceptual element of the torn page is lost on me.
The tape has a 15-minute song on its either side. The A-side opens with some hissing drone that seems calm, yet keeps suddenly breaking, re-starting and moving around in a manner that first made me think I’ve gotten a faulty dub. Later on this interrupted drone is accompanied by some clanging industrial sounds that play without similar jumps or breaks, so it turned out that the sudden cuts and shifts were intentional after all. Aside of this conflicting element, the song is a quite stylish piece of industrial ambient. It employs a fairly sparse selection of sounds to a good effect, and this minimalist approach continues on the tape’s flipside as well.
The B-side track “She Was The Universe” offers tangible murky darkness of hoarse rattles and rumbles as well as sounds of tapes looping and rewinding, or other mechanical sounds of that ilk. It is very much a “nothing is happening” type of song, but this “nothing” exists in a space where the air is thick with quietly humming and rumbling crudity. It is a very subtle and slow song that’s based on the sounds’ rough and worn qualities rather than the sounds themselves.
I’m not an expert on the works of Atrophist, but out of the artist’s works that I’m familiar with, this single song is the most immediately striking thing I’ve heard from him. I find it very impressive how it manages to sound broken, subtle, dark and vivid simultaneously. I also like the occasional pops and crackles that perhaps seem faulty or unwanted, as they make the song a little less easy on the ears and help tie it together with the quite different A-side song. Whether this is an intentional stylistic choice or a happy accident, I can only guess. Nonetheless I’m very curious to hear more from this project.
There are no samples from this specific tape online, but you can hear something else from the project on their soundcloud page: https://soundcloud.com/iron-star-87135375
Atrophist on bandcamp: https://atrophist.bandcamp.com/
While my knowledge of your past releases is fairly limited, especially the tape’s B-side doesn’t sound like anything I’ve heard you do as Atrophist. That said, Atrophist has a fairly wide palette and isn’t afraid to mix noise and industrial together with elements more rooted in dark ambient and experimental electronics. I know noise guys are prone to having a lot of solo projects, but I’ll still ask: how did you come to start this project? Is there something in its sound, style, equipment or thematics that clearly separates it from what you’re already doing (or could do in the future) under the Atrophist name?
I’m not really one of those noise dudes who start a new project for each new sound, idea, theme, gear purchase etc. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if that’s how you prefer to do it. But I like the idea of doing a wide range of things under the Atrophist moniker — as you pointed out. Atrophist itself was, originally, a solo side project that came out of a duo I was in briefly about 10 years ago, whitephosphorus (lowercase w intentional). whitephosphorus never played live and only put out one ultra-obscure tape, I think it was like 20 copies or so? Its main (well, only) achievement was an appearance on Harald Mentor’s Death to Posers web radio show. So after whitephosphorus folded, Atrophist became my only project for many years. The first Atrophist side project was the ritual ambient (-ish) Comatose Levitation, which died on arrival, since the debut show was a total disaster due to two simultaneous gear malfunctions. Comatose Levitation later found a new life as a sort of crypto-Atrophist, and played a few shows in more sophisticated environments where the main project might not necessarily be welcome.
About a year ago I felt like I wanted to do something quite different, for a variety of reasons. I had had a series of unsuccessful live shows, and generally was feeling frustrated with the main project. So I decided it was time to do something I had wanted to do for quite a while — a project with the ultimate goal of achieving sounds that are so slow and minimal as to be almost non-existent, while still maintaining some type of purpose and interest for the potential listener. Obviously “Esoteric Pseudoscience” is still very far from that goal, and I intend to take my time getting there, if I ever do.
My knowledge of sci-fi is near non-existant, and the little interest I have in pseudoscience is focused on entirely other things than matters of space. So, I understand pretty much nothing of the tape’s themes. Why the name Iron Star, and are that name and the tape’s title Esoteric Pseudoscience somehow connected? Why was the tape wrapped in pages of this specific book?
Iron Star is not a reference to the Soviet Red Army, like someone assumed it was, hah. It’s a concept from speculative cosmology — a type of star that may form in the extremely distant future, assuming protons do not decay.
Iron Star is similar to Atrophist, in the sense that neither project has very clearly defined themes. They are more like loose networks of vaguely interconnected impressions. The abstract nature of noise isn’t very well suited to communicating very clear and straightforward ideas anyway, in my opinion.
“Esoteric Pseudoscience” is basically meaningless but impressive sounding BS, and that’s totally intentional. Still, there’s some kind of point behind it. The page the tape is wrapped in is from A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram. This book is frustrating, because it contains a lot of self-congratulation and denigrates others the author disagrees with. It takes a well-understood and uncontroversial mathematical concept (cellular automata), applies it to other fields of science, and then insists the results are somehow completely life-altering and paradigm-breaking. So, if this tape has a well-defined theme, it would be something like “high scientific ideas and concepts made deliberately obscure and complicated, to serve stupid human ego and narcissism”. I hasten to add that I’m not suggesting I myself am free of this, as evidenced by the very existence of the project and the release. Nor am I an expert in any of this stuff, by any means.
There’s a calm droning sound on the A-side that keeps suddenly breaking and cutting in a manner that seems somehow random or like a broken mechanism. The tape’s B-side on the other hand is not just broken but has beed downright ground to dust. Perhaps it’s this erasure that makes it remind me of XXXX’s side on their split tape with Half Mile Down that Untergeschoss and Nekorekords published in 2012. I recall it was described as being the result of erasing and overdubbing source tapes until the original sounds are completely erased and there’s just their fading and decaying remnants to hear. So, how were these tracks created? The two tracks are very different in style, so did they employ radically different gear or methods?
The two sides of the tape are basically rehearsal recordings that I made, preparing for the two gigs Iron Star has played to date. Side A is, essentially, the Iron Star show I played in the Redi mall last fall, in recorded form. And side B is like the show from Vuotalo this January. I wanted to keep things as simple and minimal as possible, in terms of the gear used as well. There’s actually no great difference in how the two tracks were recorded, the main differences are just the source sounds and samples used. For both tracks I used a modded cassette player and a Microgranny “sampler”. The Microgranny is extremely limited, unintuitive and any samples you record on it sound genuinely awful — even without using the on-board bitcrusher effect. I actually really enjoy using it exactly because of this, since I don’t get the feeling I should be making better use of it, or using it in some cIever or complicated way. I also used a Liven Texture Lab in effects mode on the A track, but before recording side B I had already replaced it with a Field Kit FX.
You’ve performed live with Iron Star, so it seems you have more intentions with the project than just making this one tape. Is either of the tape’s tracks representative of what you’ll be doing with the project in the future, or do you plan to venture into a third and wholly different direction?
I’ve already started working on the next Iron Star release. It’s titled “Cold Computers” and the theme is transhumanism, in the same haphazard and indirect way I mentioned above. Transhumanism and its practical applications interest me, for reasons that ought to be obvious to anyone who’s met me in person. On a more general level, transhumanism doesn’t seem to enjoy a lot of support or sympathy in the noise scene, especially the part of the scene that overlaps with black metal and its general rejection of humanism and anthropocentrism. I find this a bit puzzling since to my mind, folks like this ought to be among the most eager to leave baseline humanity in the dirt and move on to something better.
Soundwise I intend to continue in the direction of side B of “Esoteric Pseudoscience”, towards a more minimal atmosphere, where each individual sound needs to count for something. I’m also looking forward to performing live again with the project.
I think the latest Atrophist release I’ve got is your C60 split tape with Pain Appendix which Antipatik Records published in 2024. The tape features both live and un-live material from both projects, as its name “Alive & Unalive” would suggest. It was published about a year ago so I suspect it’s no longer your latest release, so, what are the latest news from Atrophist?
Actually there have been two releases since the Pain Appendix split: “Perverted Architect” from Tribe Tapes, and “Hunt the Night” from Narcolepsia. While I’ve been lukewarm about a few of my recent live shows, these two tapes I’m actually quite happy with, and consider them my best releases. I’ve already finished the next Atrophist release, titled “The Happiest Country in the World” and submitted it to a label. I’m hoping it’s good enough for them!
I’m also trying to rework my live approach and hopefully live Atrophist gigs will continue in the fall of ’25. I’d like to play more shows outside the capital region — always playing in shows you organize yourself gets boring, for you and the audience both, and it can even feel unfair, taking up a slot that could go to an artist who hasn’t had as many opportunities to perform live. Playing in one’s own shows also has the drawback of having difficulty concentrating, since you are not just responsible for your performance but also the success of the whole event as well.
I think that rather as a noise artist, you’re even better known as a noise gig organizer in the Helsinki area of Finland. Some of those events took place in a shopping mall, which attracted a pretty different audience than those who show up at the more remotely and privately organized noise gigs. Do you still organize shows like that, or in more private settings? Are there any events coming up that you could mention here?
Noise Space was originally the idea of Satanoid, a guy who used to perform a sort of mix of speedcore and noise on a Frankenstein’s monster of a diy modular system, with some pedals and who knows what else integrated into it. I lost touch with him a few years ago and I’ve no idea what he’s up to now. Anyway, I got a tip from him that it was possible for anyone to arrange live shows in the so-called “container town” of Kalasatama, part of the same complex as the Oranssi and Tiivistämö venues, for those familiar with Helsinki. So I booked the place and the first Noise Space featured Atrophist, Satanoid, [ówt krì], Fell Hand and Captain Heroin. Unfortunately due to absolutely torrential rain hardly anyone showed up, but otherwise everything went well and I was looking forward to trying it again in the same place. To my dismay, we were told that it would not be possible anymore, and the whole venue would move indoors, to the nearby shopping mall north of the metro tracks.
The idea of organizing a noise show in a shopping mall seemed so idiotic and doomed to disaster that we decided to try it for a laugh. In the end, it wasn’t quite the disaster we were expecting, so Noise Space shows continued, in the beginning mostly because of the lack of better alternatives. I recall that around the time of NS5 or NS6 I was starting to think that it had ran its course, and it was time to call it a day. Then came Covid, and everything had to be put on hold anyway. After lockdowns, Noise Space attendance started ballooning, my guess is because people were so eager to be out doing something again. After a couple of events with 100+ people I felt like it had gotten too big, and it could not possibly continue before someone complains about it. Which then indeed happened, and there weren’t any Noise Space events for over a year, I think. I kept getting queries from people who wanted to perform, so in the end I decided to continue. Right now the idea is to have two of these events a year, one in spring and another in fall, until they get canceled for good, and then move on to organizing nothing but completely private ug shows.
I have always tried to organize private shows whenever possible as well. The most memorable shows I personally remember seeing have all been in environments that are about as far from a shopping mall as imaginable: a notorious shipping container in the middle of nowhere on the Vantaa tundra, or a damp underground garage, or private rave cave etc. The shows in the shopping mall have, inevitably, a certain “showcase” feel, and they do attract lots of quote-unquote “tourists”. Although I am very happy to report that the Helsinki scene’s usual suspects do almost always show up, as well. I should also point out that I don’t think there is anything wrong with being a “noise tourist”, least of all in a setting like this. It’s perfectly fine to show up out of curiosity, with no clear idea yet what you want your level of involvement to be. With less public gigs, people may feel differently, quite understandably so. Generally speaking, I can be quite sceptical of “scenefication” — I can see the benefit, but it can also lead to clusterized and uniform tastes and opinions, dress, behaviors etc. This isn’t necessarily a problem in and of itself, but if it goes far enough it will inevitably begin to limit creativity. But anyway, that’s another topic.
Upcoming gigs:
Noise Space events in 2025:
Saturday April 26:
Lung Knots, Varpu, Heppakirjat, Mathieu Sylvestre, Hail Conjurer & Absolute Key
Saturday October 11:
Iron Star, Obscvrat, Nikama, Bryskt, Dystopian Control
Gray Ritual 3, Wednesday July 30:
Malaise 57, Ruusuriimu, Moozzhead, Inhóspito, Tantric Death, Hingst
Like the two previous GR gigs, this is a private show in an undisclosed location, if you are interested write to: grayritual@gmail.com.