Finnish producer Vladislav Delay (actual name: Sasu Ripatti) may use multiple names for his different sonic impulses, but his personas aren't static: Each expresses an arc of transformation which belies his status as an accomplished polymath. On his albums as Luomo, Ripatti has moved from sensuous longform deep house to stuttery vocal house-pop; on his three albums as Uusitalo, the shift has been more subtle, a gradual, tectonic drift from dub-techno abstraction toward tech-house's disciplined physical economy. These narratives do not exist in isolation, and the revitalisation of the Uusitalo project feels like a semi-conscious acknowledgment that the Luomo project has arrived at an aesthetic dead end, with much of last year's Paper Tigers feeling like hastily assembled footnotes and addendums to the glittering manifesto of 2003's The Present Lover. If Delay doesn't know how to take voluptuous house-pop any further, then Uusitalo's more measured tone offers a potential escape route, allowing Delay to reconnect with house from a new perspective uncluttered by the expectations that attach to his more famous moniker.
The instrumental Karhunainen is understated despite its relative forcefulness, the pumping kickdrums perhaps too straightforward for listeners who prefer Delay's history of fractured dub wanderings, but dry and reserved when compared to Luomo's lustrous gleam. The album misses the sort of thematic clarity or alluring vocals that made Luomo's Vocalcity and The Present Lover so pivotal and influential for so many, but what it loses in crossover points it gains in dancefloor currency, with Delay cunningly positioning his sound at the dead centre of current European house and techno. More metallic than most of the last year's crop of deep house revivalism, and yet chunkier and warmer than the rapidly receding minimal archetype, these tightly wound and glistening grooves share much with recent releases from producers such as Simon Baker and Tobi Neumann.
Paradoxically, according with the dictates of fashion has a liberating effect on Delay: By abandoning auteurist conceptuality, he regains a lightness of touch rare in even his most pleasure-centred previous efforts. In particular, the energetically squelchy house of "Satumaa" expresses a joyfulness that is unlike any of the producer's past work, perhaps because it's not about anything other than the effervescence of its own groove. Not that the album is a straight dancefloor bomb: The largely beatless opener "Vesi Virtaa Veri", with its funereal chords and sampled found sound (rustling papers, far off voices, the pant of heavy breathing and the coagulated whine of passing traffic) enigmatically suggests the commencement of a long-dreaded journey, while the shimmering synthesiser hum of closer "Puut Juuritaan" resembles a heartsore Tangerine Dream.
But the rest of Karunainen sidelines emotional impact in favour of honing in on the sheer physical intensity of the endlessly reiterated beat. After "Vesi Virtaa Veri", "Korpikansa" immediately drops the listener into a monomaniacal two-note house groove (its furrow-browed pump leavened by an endlessly mutating array of percussive effects) that seems content to drive forward into a constantly receding horizon, its magic lying in the friction generated by its repetition/mutation equation. Such tracks initially feel rigid when compared with the languorous dub-disco grooves of Luomo's Vocalcity album, but on repeated listens Karhunainen is revealed as one of Luomo's most impressively fluid works to date, the percussion changing with the organic rapidity of molecular generation-- just try to keep up with the kaleidoscope of detail on "Tohtori Kuka", or to trace the transformation of Sikojen Juhla from buzzy house to clattering schaffel and back again.
This sense of the real action happening almost beneath or beyond the level of conscious awareness is one of the album's quiet strengths: as with Stewart Walker's recent Concentricity (another shift toward anti-auteurist dancefloor populism from a distinguished producer), Karhunainen so carefully intersects rigorous simplicity and mindboggling complexity that the two become conflated, with the accumulated whispers of intricate detail and the hefty thump of the house grooves emerging dialectically, like Escher hands drawing one another. As such, it stands in opposition to Paper Tigers, whose collages of clean surfaces and clattering irruptions felt anything but organic. If the latter album wanted to articulate the messiness of desire (the gulf between the fantasy and the reality of other people's bodies), Karhunainen draws back to the deeper relationship we share with our own bodies, the sheer rightness of its grooves suggesting the immediacy of physical submersion.
