"As is true for the best techno, Polar Inertia’s final offering, π, puts you into stasis while it slowly transforms everything else around you."
They say that your birth date, your phone number, and any meaningful set of digits appear somewhere deep within π – “Pi”. It’s a number so vast that we have yet to find the end to it despite our ability to transmit invisible data through the air. The paragraphs I have written here, word for word, letter for letter, encoded as numbers, exist somewhere in Pi. Maybe Pi is an example of Infinity, or Infinity is an example of Pi. We don’t know yet.
As is true for the best techno, Voiski’s final offering as Polar Inertia puts you into stasis while it slowly transforms everything else around you. Over the years, Polar Inertia has explored long-form, introspective techno, dark ambient, and noise. Still, beyond efforts to apply labels, they weave their music for the purpose of a greater narrative rather than simply fitting within genre. Like on their live-recorded audio odyssey “Can We See Well Enough To Move On”, their music begs you to answer the unanswered questions of a vast and desolate world.
Where earlier Polar Inertia releases felt like chapters from a book, π is more of an epic. In this last transmission, we get one final glimpse into infinity.
19th Century composer Richard Wagner came up with the phrase Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art”, a word reserved for art that operates across several forms of media. Art that combines music, text, imagery, drama. Art that, through its extra-dimensionality, ascends above what we typically call “art”. There’s no question that this is the plane on which Polar Inertia has been operating on. To call it an “album”, or “music”, is convenient, but it’s an oversimplification.
Your first encounter with Polar Inertia might be the flashing, static-filled images of an arctic void, and of silhouettes of the “Polar Children”, two beings that seem to not be bound by time or space. Across each of Polar Inertia’s releases in the last decade-and-a-half, the Polar Children have mysteriously appeared in some form. Polar Inertia’s music follows these two entities through ice and snow.
French philosopher Paul Virilio’s book L’Inertie polaire (Polar Inertia) explores how, as the pace of technology increases, the physical space that a human travels through inversely decreases. Long ago, we once travelled far and wide to find food, to engage in conversation, to live. And now, we move less and less. We are the nodes where information terminates. As in the music of Polar Inertia, we have begun to approach stasis, a wintering of the self.
In Virilio’s book are five chapters: “Indirect Light” – “The Last Vehicle” – “Kinematic Optics” – “Environment Control” and finally “Polar Inertia”. All four of Polar Inertia’s previous releases share the same names as Virilio’s book chapters, and “Polar Inertia”, Pi, the final chapter, is where we now find ourselves.
Across Polar Inertia’s releases are spoken word passages, first-hand accounts. Researchers who come into contact with the Polar Children, who find themselves merging with, embodying, even becoming them.
“The Polar Children dissolved into one being, in a sort of systematic, celestial breakdown that liberated the inherent powers of all that is tangible, consolidating all matter into one entity. Was this the Polar Inertia?”
Embedded in the music is this mental disease all humans are afflicted by – our need to catalog and codify everything that exists, and to endlessly question that which cannot be explained. Like how Ernest Shackleton was engulfed in the Antarctic, we too have become engulfed in this abyss of eternal progress. In Polar Inertia’s music, we begin to lose ourselves.
The beginning of π will feel immediately familiar to the initiated. “π”, the title track, opens as cavernous as ever. This is one last sighting of the Children. Through it, we experience the fulfillment of a promise that started with Virilio’s book.
In the two years since 2024’s Environment Control, Polar Inertia has crafted a sound that engulfs and beckons us to merge with it. π is a concept album that does not hold back. In practically every track, Polar Inertia explores the boundaries of everything they’ve previously released. It’s about as satisfying of a conclusion to the project as one could hope for.
“FRAME DRAGGING” sees Polar Inertia at their highest velocity. Like a frozen body being dragged and etched across time, the stillness of the self is contrasted against the increasing speed of everything else around it. The ending of this track is as surprising as the beginning. It’s vast and beautiful, almost zen-like in comparison to where we started.
“FLOATING MEMORY” is heavier and noisier, with distorted icebergs of noise cracking off at random intervals in the distance. The track tunnels forward with a heaviness that hasn’t been heard ever before across all of Polar Inertia’s work. “UNFOLDING ELSE WHERE” explores the outer regions of this landscape, evoking a lot of the same ambient exploration we’ve previously heard on “Can We See Well Enough”.
“SILENT MOTION” takes us further down this dark tunnel of noise. It’s an especially hypnotic track to hear on good speakers, with a pendulous kick that echoes across the stereo field while an atonal cloud builds this intense sense of anxiety. “THE SHAPE OF TIME” feels impossibly low, a rumbling, cinematic force that penetrates the soul. Infinity as sound. A standout track.
Listening to this final album by Polar Inertia feels like watching a supernova, the death of a brilliant star in the sky. The first four chapters of the project were fantastic, but π is truly next level, without exaggeration. It’s about as conceptual as a concept album can get.
‘MTY314 – π’ is out now via Mama Told Ya. Order a copy from Bandcamp.
TRACKLIST
1. π
2. FRAME DRAGGING
3. FLOATING MEMORY
4. UNFOLDING ELSE WHERE
5. SEA OF DATA
6. INTIMATE IMMENSITY
7. SILENT MOTION
8. THE SHAPE OF TIME
9. HAVA |∞
10. FRACTURED
11. t_Pkyo