Sasu Ripatti's one previous album as Sistol, a self-titled collection of singles and sketches, came out in 1999. That makes it one of the Finnish producer's earliest releases, and it sounds like the work of a young artist trying to find his own aesthetic, tentatively combining a bunch of hot-in-'99 sounds like the dub techno of Chain Reaction and the early microhouse of Perlon. Halfway between a murky chill-out record and something pitched at the dancefloor, Sistol lacks for the craft or innovation or individualism of the records that inspired Ripatti in the first place.
Sistol is juvenilia, and if you're familiar with it, you'll wonder why Ripatti even revived the moniker for On the Bright Side. For one thing, this album sounds nothing like its predecessor. And not just in the sense that Ripatti has grown more confident as a producer over the last 11 years. The very materials he used to make Sistol-- the muffled bass, gently ticking beats, and blurry ambient textures-- are nowhere to be found here. In fact, he's gone in the complete opposite direction.
For On the Bright Side, Ripatti draws from the rawness of the analog, bleep-and-bass techno that swept Northern England at the turn of the 90s-- loud and industrial-tinged rave that could never be mistaken for ambient or micro anything. Releasing this music under the Sistol alias almost feels like Ripatti is being perverse. You were expecting some light, fuzzy avant-techno? Well here's a bunch of sharp-edged bangers.
On the Bright Side can be a cold, metallic record, which makes sense considering that it pays homage to the kind of music DJs once played at 3 a.m. in unheated warehouses. Despite Ripatti's deserved rep for lush deep house and softly undulating ambient, we learn he's also got a real knack for rusty jack-your-body drums and buzzsaw rave riffs. What's equally surprising is how well he manages to blend the often stiff and regimented rhythms of bleep-and-bass era techno with his own supple and deeply dub-influenced 21st-century style.
On the Bright Side isn't a retro-at-all-costs kind of record. Ripatti didn't run out and buy a bunch of vintage tech in hopes of recreating a specific era down to the last canned hi-hat. Listening, I'd say he's still working digitally, and he captures the vibe of hard Sheffield techno, the brute boom-tick, while also bringing in the liquid syncopations and polyrhythmic layering that 21st-century digital editing makes possible. If you're a fan of bleep acts like Unique 3 and Sweet Exorcist, you'll certainly get a new and unexpected fix from On the Bright Side, but Ripatti also amplifies the latent reggae flavor of bleep by doing things with echo and reverb that would have been impossible with drum machines of 1990.
But there's one thing that definitively separates On the Bright Side from the white-label classics it references: It's not a pop album in any way, shape, or form. Bleep-era acts like LFO and Nightmares on Wax may have loved their steel-bending basslines, but they also loved hooks, be they swooning divas or Kraftwerkian vocoder japes. Despite Ripatti's facility with vocals as Luomo, here he restricts his hooks to minimal synth riffs, short but catchy bursts of blare. So On the Bright Side isn't precisely anti-pop either. It's just a club record, a good one, its appeal ultimately limited to those already down with instrumental techno, but especially those who might be curious as to how one of the 21st century's most adept producers can seamlessly combine old-school with new.
