New Year's Day, 2003. At a semi-luxury hotel a few kilometers from the coast, a sprawling complex of balconied buildings and a swimming pool nestled next to a stand of trees, a few hundred ravers in summer duds-- some in dirty Diesels, some in bikinis, and all eyes hidden behind enormous, smoke-colored shades-- pivot and sway while the last molecules of MDMA sweat their way out of their systems. On a stage facing the pool, a skinny young man with a blond mane swigs champagne from the bottle while he nudges absently at a computer mouse; his own massive eyeshield tosses off disco glints that mirror the flashes of light that go tearing up the firelines between bass and space in his music.
It's every Balearic cliché at once, except that this isn't Ibiza, it's Reñaca, Chile; and the laptop jockey isn't Sasha van Oakenweed but a skinny Finn named Luomo, née Sasu Ripatti, best known until not long before as Vladislav Delay-- a former free-jazz drummer who made the leap to Chain Reaction-styled "heroin house" before being crowned prince of clicks + cuts. The event is notable for several reasons, among them the globalization of European leisure culture; but the real significance here concerns the ongoing conversion of tight-lipped minimalism into something self-consciously sexy and sophisticated and Ecstasy-friendly. It's the preface to an ongoing evolution that is only coming to fruition in 2005, when the Sasha van Oakenweeds of the world pepper their mixes with tracks from Kompakt and Traum, and Creamfields' beachside raves feature the likes of Ellen Allien and Blackstrobe alongside Deep Dish and Carl Cox. In many ways, all this began with Luomo's 2000 debut, Vocalcity, reissued this month on Ripatti's own Huume label.
Vocalcity was unexpected, and not a little audacious: "Luomo-- The Next Episode in House-- prod. by Vladislav Delay," proclaimed a sticker on the sleeve. The album was published by Force Tracks, one of an avalanche of sublabels from Frankfurt's Force Inc., an erstwhile "proper" techno imprint that had gone all theoretical as it aged, christening sublabels after Deleuze and Guattari tomes and fashioning grand philosophies around concepts like "clicks + cuts." (Full disclosure: I wrote the liner notes for Clicks + Cuts 2.) "The Next Episode in House" sounded like the kind of sweeping, appropriationist, Zeitgeist-stroking statement that Force would make-- but damned if it weren't true. If anything, it sounds even truer today. It's not that Luomo advanced the cause of house music in some way that his forebears (Chez Damier, Derrick May, and Maurizio, to pick three) didn't manage to. But there was nothing else that sounded like Vocalcity at the time, and there's been precious little that sounds like it since, including Luomo's slightly disappointing, ill-fated 2003 followup The Present Lover.
Writing in The Wire back in 2001, I pegged Vocalcity as the tipping point (the clipping point?) in what I called microhouse-- a genre that seemed to take the essential template of house music and shrink its constituent parts (that shoomping beat, a cavernous sense of space, and an echo of soul music as processed through disco) down to byte-sized pieces, leaving a schematic of dotted lines swimming through oceans of dubwise absence. But listening now, it's clear that I got it exactly backwards, at least in Luomo's case. What stands out now, a half-decade later, isn't the smallness of Vocalcity's sounds but its fullness. Sure, Luomo has the requisite clicks and clanks; as "Market", the absolutely epic lead track, opens up, half the action is in the chattering of truncated hi-hats and a distant rattle that sounds like an army of mechanics spinning their ratchets. But house music has always had these kind of details; for comparison, just listen to E-Dancer (Kevin Saunderson)'s 1997 cut "World of Deep", the track I've come to believe most closely heralds what Luomo would later attempt. Beneath those enormous, cascading pads, the hi-hats and bells have been whittled down to needlepoint proportions. Luomo emphasized his details by framing them in white space, but what you hear now, after the demise of clicks + cuts, aren't the pinpricks but the enormous, inflated sounds of everything else-- bass, pads, and of course those vocals.
True to its name, Vocalcity put breathy, yearning male and female vocals at the center of its pneumatic mix. Tracks like "Market", "Class", "Synkro", and "Tessio"-- a full two-thirds of the six-track, triple LP-- expand like inner tubes as those voices come rushing in. Indeed, my favorite element of the album has always been the way that "Market" begins by teasing in the vocalist's breaths and sighs, one tiny gasp at a time, along with fragments of sung melody buried deep, deep, deep in the mix. Only at 4:48, nearly halfway through the 12-minute track, does she finally introduce the full vocal hook. And when the sad reprimand drops-- "There's nothing in the world that you can do," repeated a full five times, then a quick breath, and finally the explosive charge buried in the slug, "For me"-- Well, we could talk about formalism all day, but people, that right there is one of the most perfect moments in the world of pop music, albeit a full minute and 18 seconds after most pop songs have punched out the clock and gone home to sleep.
That's the triumph of Vocalcity. Not reduction, but expansion. Vladislav Delay has always aimed for the long view. (If you think Luomo's tracks are long-- "She-Center", at 10 minutes, is the shortest thing on Vocalcity, and the rest average around 12 minutes apiece-- check out Vladislav Delay's 2000 album Entain, where the cuts run from 15 to 22 minutes long. 2001's Anima went even further, comprising a single, hourlong track that swirls in place like a dead tide.) If there's anything "micro" in Vocalcity, it's the way tiny little holes open up within the frizzing chords, as though you could see the pixels framing each fraying waveform. But that's all academic. Five years later, "minimal" techno has fattened itself up again. Most of today's rave hits don't sound anything like Luomo, but I don't think anything today would sound the way it does if Luomo hadn't seduced the tinkerers away from their mouse pads and back to the land of goosebumps and sex. What you hear most in Luomo today are the stomach-punching bass lines, the pistoning chords inherited straight from Chicago's finest, and those maddeningly ambiguous vocals, always hovering just out of reach. Perhaps the long exception is the male refrain in "Synkro", which could stand as the tautological epigraph to the album's simple brilliance: "Because you move/ The way you move."
