[Uncharted Audio]

It seems inevitable that if you make electronic music in a Nordic country, journalists are either going to write about how “icy” your music is or how it’s channeling the northern lights, or that it’s some kind of tribute to a never-ending midsummer beach party, as though people from those countries can only make music based on extremes. Ukkonen is a shadowy Finnish producer who may or may not live north of the Arctic Circle, and unsurprisingly I’ve already seen “icy” attached to his name — but for once it might actually be apt.

His Spatia EP, released for the Uncharted Audio label, bears shades of all sorts of influences, namely the early waves of Detroit techno and Warp’s bleep years. He pulls them together with a tremendous sense of patience, with each track unfolding like a miniature odyssey — which makes some sense, considering he has 17-minute pieces in his catalog. Although its drums and floaty melody move along at a fair clip, the deep reverb that underscores “Kerrokset” gives the track an immense feeling of space. “Primed” gives the impression it’s somehow narrowing to a point; it’s the most active, most overtly Detroit piece here, full of a driving tunnel vision. The title track hints at what Jamal Moss might sound like without the noise (and on downers). It’s a subtly morphing wormhole draped in dense, palatial pads and led by a fuzzed bass line and shards of glassy synthesizer. “Tresgradus” and “Cordiskator,” the two shortest pieces, are predominantly rhythmic excursions into rolling breaks territory, but maintain the elegant atmospherics of their more developed counterparts. To try to bring this thing full-circle, the iciness on Spatia is less about temperature than it is about emptiness, and while it’s probably foolish to assume that Ukkonen is holed up in a metal cabin at the edge of the world, his tracks do convey a strong sense of isolated, stoic individualism.