Mika Hallbäck Vuorenpää has been active in underground electronic music for three decades. Beginning as a DJ in 1996 and releasing his first records as Grovskopa in 2001, he has spent much of that time navigating the intersections of techno, industrial music, post-punk and experimental electronics.
For more than a decade, Grovskopa became synonymous with uncompromising machine music: dense, physical and informed by industrial techno's most functional and forward-thinking traditions. In 2010, a motorcycle accident left Hallbäck Vuorenpää spending the following years in and out of hospitals and surgeries. As the long recovery reshaped his relationship to both sound and movement, he brought the Grovskopa project to a close in 2011. The hard-edged physicality that had defined the project no longer felt like a natural language.
What emerged instead was Rivet. Through a series of releases exploring grief, memory, atmosphere and songcraft without abandoning his roots in dance music, Rivet became a vehicle for a broader emotional and musical vocabulary. His debut album On Feather and Wire arrived on Editions Mego in 2020, followed by L+P-2 on Midnight Shift in 2023, which Resident Advisor described as “a touching and occasionally searing portrait of grief through the lens of post-punk techno.” Beyond the club and record format, Rivet has composed music for several contemporary dance works by choreographer Frédéric Gies, extending his practice into performance contexts. His third album, Peck Glamour, was released on Editions Mego in 2025.
Alongside his work as an artist, Hallbäck Vuorenpää has spent years contributing to the wider electronic music community through label work, production, curation and festival programming. He is the founder of Kess Kill, a member of the core team behind Malmö's internationally acclaimed experimental music festival and platform INTONAL, and has worked as producer and mixer for numerous artists. In 2025 he produced and mixed Sandwell District's celebrated comeback album End Beginnings.
In autumn 2026, Grovskopa returns after a fifteen-year absence. Not because the circumstances that ended the project have disappeared, but because the language that first inspired it feels increasingly absent from contemporary techno. Having spent decades drawing from industrial and machine music traditions, Hallbäck Vuorenpää sees their influence fading from a scene that once thrived on their energy and ideas. The return is less a revival than a continuation: an attempt to contribute to a tradition that shaped him and that, in his view, remains unfinished.
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