GENRE: Electronic

LABEL: Sahko

REVIEWED: 27th September, 2025

RATING: 8.2/10

Sysivalo feels like an elegiac epilogue to Mika Vainio’s body of work—a posthumous release compiled from his notes and sketches, assembled by collaborators to fulfill a vision he had outlined.  The title itself—“Sysivalo,” a fusion of the Finnish words sysi (dark) and valo (light)—suggests the album’s tension between shadow and illumination. 

Spanning 20 brief tracks, the album steers away from the more brutal, austere edges of Vainio’s earlier output and instead embraces a gentler but no less intense palette of sound.  The “Etudes” that open the record set a meditative, spectral tone: foggy drones, sinewy resonances, and granular textures that seem to erode from silence.  Tracks like Etude 4 introduce delicate, melodic material—blended with hum and haze—in a way that feels almost hymnal in its simplicity. 

Though the album moves largely in abstraction, moments of familiarity and emotional weight surface. On T-Bahn, for instance, the pulse of techno returns—muted, shadowy, and spectral—reminding us of Ø’s origins.  Loputon, the closing track, is often singled out as its emotional centerpiece: a slow, ceremonious drift from indistinct microtonal fog into shimmering tones, fading finally into wind. 

One of the album’s most compelling achievements is how it negotiates contrast—not through extremes but through gradations. The Quietus praises its “intimate and yielding” character, noting how it resists reducing itself to mere darkness or brightness.  Boomkat describes it as a “deeply personalized set of sonic postcards,” invoking delicate melodies, cavernous bass, and ambient weight in equal measure.  And Pitchfork frames it as “a soft yet determined gleam holding fast against the darkness.” 

In the context of Vainio’s discography, Sysivalo doesn’t feel like a divergence so much as a summation—less about extreme force than about reflection, memory, and the art of holding space. It’s a work that invites deep listening, rewarding patience with moments of fragile beauty and whispered confrontation.

While it may lack the raw wallop of his earlier, more confrontational records, Sysivalo offers a moving, understated finale—one that complements rather than competes with his legacy. For those already attuned to Ø’s language of silence, decay, and resonance, this album resonates as both farewell and continuation.