Formed in 2009 by four inner-space travellers from western Finland, Kairon; IRSE! is a rare bird, near-impossible to classify. The Wire describes their music as a “viperous cocktail of space rock, Greg Lake-era King Crimson and free jazz”, and ever since their debut album, Ujubasajuba set Bandcamp buzzing in 2014, their records have been hidden classics of modern psych-rock for those in the know. It was their sophomore release, Ruination, in 2017 that established Kairon; IRSE!’s place in the canon of Finnish genre-bending freakout fusion, bringing them widespread critical acclaim and a multitude of wild-eyed devotees to their astral-magic live-shows. Prog Magazine referred to their “propulsive storm of
psych rock hiss’n’fizz”, and Kairon; IRSE!’s carefully crafted song structures came to the fore on Ruination, flexing a newly-forged pop sensibility for reshaping past influences into a futuristic tour de force of consciousness expansion. The Guardian found their music “as invigorating as a dip in a Finnish lake”, with “a sense of the visionary and sublime”, featuring Kairon; IRSE! as New Band Of The Week . Following a European tour in 2017, Kairon; IRSE! set sails for a performance at Roadburn Festival 2018, securing their name in the heart of the underground as rising stars of psychedelic post-rock.
As the new decade unfolds, Kairon; IRSE! prepare to pour down their multicoloured dreams thru your cerebral cortex on their highly anticipated new 3rd album,Polysomn. A treasure-trove of glitching, elated sounds, that takes psychedelia into a new dimension, Polysomn brings to mind the melodic lightning of bands like Dungen, the chainsawing alternative guitar fuzz of My Bloody Valentine, the sparkle and dreamscape of Slowdive, and the technological envelope-pushing of Radiohead’s outsider works.
Boldly self-produced, Niko from Kairon; IRSE! explains their further evolution into inner-space song-craft on Polysomn:
We had a clear goal in our mind of what we should sound like, therefore we chose to produce the album by ourselves. Our goal was to make an intact and more compact album that all of its songs would support individually.
With the band fully in control of their distorted, euphoric bliss-machine of psychedelic post-rock, the result couldn’t be more refreshingly pop. Every twist and turn of Polysomn’s acid-laced chaos is calculated in shimmering brilliance and maximised for the heavy ecstasy of sonic enlightenment. We doubt that 2020 deserves a more blissful audio trip than Polysomn, going interstellar from the 11th of September 2020, via Svart Records.