Luomo – Vocalcity

Books have been written about this album, but I haven't yet. Our guy Sasu Ripatti started doing house with the same elements used for his ambient/idm compositions, and ended up creating something very unique that gathers the dubbiest part of italo disco and boogie, mixes them with the chopped and reassembled vocals from uk garage and speed garage and mastered it in the same way some 90s electronica albums like "Black Secret Technology" or "Jacob's Optical Stairway" were, with barely any stereo separation. It is a mix of approaches and influences, accidental and intentional, that create six monster tracks which basically kicked off the microhouse genre out of the gate for three very happy years (2000-2003 are probably my favourite years in electronica, with a huge fall in quality the following year which brings to my discourse "2004 the year where we all got dumb", shortly in your screens).

20th Anniversary Re-Master colored 3xLP still up for grabs on boomkat.
https://boomkat.com/products/vocalcity

Really sneaks up on the listener. At the surface, it's repetitive, glitchy, nighttime techno. It feels patched together, slightly dystopian, futuristic, like an artificial intelligence reassembled bits and pieces of other techno pop songs. But then you get hit in the heart with that oh-so-soulful chorus line in "Tessio" and it all makes sense: THIS is what he was doing and building up to the whole album. Which makes the listen really exciting, and worthwhile. When that chorus hit, it was every bit of being buried alone in a booth in the back of a noodle house on cold rainy nights in a densely populated northern city. I personally remember going through difficult times, being poor, but listening to this, you really felt a strange mixture of hi-tech and low-life, glitzy and dancey but never shallow and ultimately quite uplifting. The slightly abrasive opening shuffle of "Market" has a warm human chorus buried inside the digital nanobites, and then things get moving even more with "Class", before they slowdown a tad with "Synkro", get slightly funky on "The Right Wing" which then morphs into the epic "Tessio". This is a high accomplishment in electronic dance music and is essential listening, especially on a good stereo so you can appreciate the dense, layered, incredibly detailed and alive production, bursting and glowing like crystals and night city lights.

• boy oh boy here comes another day of me wondering at this album. Vocalcity contains perhaps the most affecting, intimate, deeply emotional "house" music (treated in a Vladislav Delay way) I've ever listened to, with the stuggering, original, out-of-this-world level of production and hidden atmospheres. when it comes to attention to detail, it just doesn't get better than this. how often do you come across such a combo these days?? truly unique stuff, in a class of its own. a blindingly brilliant output by Sasu •

While i love almost all of Ripatti's work, this is truly a masterpiece.Dubby, dreamy house side soundscapes interwined with beautiful vocals.All tracks have a very warm, mellow feeling, especially Market and Tessio.I have been listening to this album for the last couple of months constantly and it just gets better and better each time i play it.

In my opinion this is the best album he made.Buy it, it will be the best money you spent in a long time...

Vladislav Delay, perhaps better known for his ambient work, assumes his Luomo disguise for some epic deep house. And when I say epic, I mean it in the best way; these tracks take their time to develop fully, adding and subtracting elements, rather than just maximizing their time on the dancefloor. “Market,” the opening track, starts with a steady beat and some sweeping tech-house chords and doesn’t let go; “Synkro” has some whispery vocals floating atop the rhythms and submerged melodies. Even though the tracks are long they never lose either their intensity or their interest. The best track on <I>Vocalcity</I>, “Tessio,” continually morphs, bypassing the whole house jam and becoming something more of a meditation on house. “She-Center” closes the album with more of the deep and dark groove to which we’ve grown accustomed. An amazingly beautiful album.

I would imagine most people that understand this comment will already know Luomo, but think Basic Channel meets Theo Parrish, maybe with a touch of Herbert. Tracks on the CD are semi mixed so as to flow into one another. Highly innovative use of vocal samples and other motifs that twist, mutate, and flow in and out. Consistently high quality throughout. Superb.