LUOMO-TESSIO-THE MOST DEPRESSING SONG EVER?????

Dan you've said this a couple of times and never said why.

I can't tell you how happy it makes me that you like Luomo, Ronan.

Actually a better example is a dinner party I went to where everyone had to bring an ingredient for this ridiculously involved paella recipe (we brought shrimp and lobster). Everyone went gaga over the ingredients, including some special roasted paprika imported from Turkey. After much hullabaloo and pomp and circumstance, including an overly-involved cooking process on an outdoor grill, we sat down to eat and it was THE BLANDEST MEAL I ATE ALL SUMMER yet all of these people sat around going, "WOW THIS IS AMAZING I MAY NEVER EAT ANOTHER MEAL AS GOOD AS THIS" and my wife and I just sat there going, "Okay, what is it we're missing here?"

I guess I just don't understand how you dislike this, and your explainations of it are woefully inadequate.

In with anger, out with love.

Why do you think I chose that analogy? I have to talk in language he understands!

that *is* the point. having said that The present Lover is a faily dissappointing album for me. I love "So You" though. Vocalcity is infinatley better and listening to the 2 different versions of Tessio illustrates that pretty clearly.

You're right though that length is sort of the point: trying to reach for a sort of becalmed tantric intensity. And certainly on both albums the nuances of the groove shift so much over the course of a track that an evaluation of whether they "do much" is entirely based on the zoom of your aural lens - from outerspace earth looks pretty non-eventful too...

i shall have to listen again because i didn't really notice that with his stuff. it still irks me a bit that a 14 minute long track can't be a 7 minute long track in this case - we're talking minimal dance music in spite of whatever number of subtle nuances lurk deep within the track.

Also for some DJs I knew it was basically just a cheesy vocal or polite bar house record take on Chain Reaction and Basic Channel stuff.

Yeah, I lost most of my interest in Luomo when the second album came out, having been obsessed with Vocalcity, Diskonize Me/Body Speaking and The Present Lover the track (which I mostly associate with the "Digital Disco" compilation).

I still listen to Vocalcity, but it always sounds flatter and thinner than I remember it used to. Maybe it's just my digital copy, too bad I don't have the vinyl.

The album of that style/era that I go back to most often now is MRI's Rhythmogenesis. "To Be Honest", "Nummern" and "Human Pattern" probably sound more like prime-era Superpitcher remixes than anything Luomo ever did, but I always associate Rhythmogenesis with Vocalcity anyway (no doubt from reading about them both on Skykicking).

I've been listening to Superlongevity 2 a bit recently, which still sounds pretty great imo, especially given the amount of personality on some of the vocal tracks - Pile's Worldrecord Holder or Chitchat On Sunset Cliff - and the relentless bass throughout the rest.

it was basically just a cheesy vocal or polite bar house record take on Chain Reaction and Basic Channel stuff

For a lot of message board posters as well. The discovery that the entire Total series is now on Spotify led to a microhouse re-immersion this week, including Vocalcity and Alcachofa.

I still love Vocalcity but it does sound anachronistic amid a lot of contemporary stuff, but then again current dance music is probably closer to 2000ish dance music (in both sound and spirit) than at any time in the past 12-13 years, so it's still easy to hear how fresh it would have sounded at the time.

Always thought Tessio was reminiscent of Tony Di Bart's 'The Real Thing'. That said I haven't heard the Di Bart song in about 20 years and am not able to check at work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rW8dg7drXA

I remember buying Vocalcity on vinyl the same day as Akufen's My Way, for instance, both from a record store in Melbourne called Synaesthesia, which was very much the place covering IDM and the kind of outerzone stuff you would find in The Wire. It wouldn't have even been on the map for most DJs in the city when it would come to buying records. While it was geared to the dancefloor (and I wonder how different the situation was in, for instance, Cologne or Berlin at the time), it wasn't so much like wtf, but grouped together with other "head music."

― MikoMcha, Friday, 1 August 2014 06:29 (4 hours ago) Permalink

I was (am) in the same city and this was true in 2000 but not by 2002. I remember going to Rhythm & Soul (one of the main dance music vinyl stores at the time) and the clerk/DJ was playing Immer and for some reason challenged me on whether i knew what it was or not - I think because he'd asked me if I needed help and i'd politely demurred, it was a "O RLY" kind of test I suppose. I passed the test which pleased me because even though he was a bit arrogant and the upwelling culture in that place was extreme he was also cute, so.

Anyway by that time microhouse/proto-minimal basically ruled all the vinyl stores. It was at this same time that Synaesthesia stopped stocking Kompakt and the like, perhaps in recognition that it had grown too populist/popular.

upselling culture. Kind of upwelling as well tho.

Hmmm... it was a turning point for sure, I also was 'tested' at DMC records when the Villalobos album came out and was told that "I must be into the really good stuff" if knew what it was :)

Nevertheless, my impression was that it was still very much transitional, with certain record store clerks and a handful of DJs certainly promoting that stuff, but this was not necessarily translating to sales or to the records that were actually being played out in the clubs. At least that was my impression, since lots of microhouse and minimal 12"s would always end up in the sale bin - so it was also a bit of a glory era for me in terms of picking up a lot of records that I really wanted cheaply (I wonder whether this also had something to do with Kompakt expanding it's distribution around that time?). Not too get too insular in terms of Melbourne record stores, but Collector's Corner ALWAYS stocked microhouse, especially almost all the Force Tracks, Kompakt, Playhouse and Profan 12"s, but this was also frequently stuff that you could get on discount a few months later as well. I should also point out that these stores stocked loads and loads of other genres and styles, including progressive house, banging techno, breaks and D&B - all of which had more expansive selections than any microhouse related in 2002 in my experience. It would often be likely that a clerk working there had not heard of Luomo or Isolee or Farben or whoever - they had a lot of different material coming in - which certainly wasn't the case at a shop like Synaesthesia which was basically just run by Mark and a couple of his friends, and curated in a really specific way.

Regardless, I almost never heard any minimal or microhouse out at that time beyond the odd thing played late night at Revolver (and of course Troika), until almost two years or so later when many techno and some house DJs had fully transitioned following tunes that were more clubby and less stark and skeletal in their production. Things coming out on Areal, Cadenza, Sender and the relentless output of Kompakt, and then early Get Physical, for example, all made a big difference. I think when a club like Honky Tonks embraced of all this, it was a sign of a clear local shift in the sound towards minimal and was also, I imagine, the main reason for Synaesthesia to quit stocking Kompakt. Not really their audience anymore.

Coming from a Warp Records / IDM background at the time (and stuff like this being very much my introduction to house), I remember people like Luomo coming up in messageboard conversation on an infrequent basis. The idea that this was a bridge for leftfield electronica fans into 'proper' dance music was quite prevalent, prob due to the Vladislav Delay connection.

Come to think of it, a weird label around then was Pokerflat, which sat between the prog house that was often being pushed at shops like Rhythm & Sound, for instance, and other microhouse releases. That said, I think I only ever bought a couple of records from that label...

Rhythm & Sound was actually a really bad shop though, I was always treated as if I should be grateful to be allowed to listen to music there. There was a real sense of entitlement, bound up with a veneration of classic deep house sounds.

Oops, Rhythm & Soul that is!

Pokerflat actually were pretty great a lot of the time, esp. Vols 2 and 4 of their comps (the Martin Landsky and Jeff Samuels mixes respectively).

Honkytonks was such a great club, but I never thought of them as suddenly switching to microhouse, more of an organic Classic Records --> Music For Freaks / Playhouse development.

There was a strong electrohouse influence at HT as well.

Actually, a key shift of course was the retitling of microhouse as minimal. The former being Sherburne's Wire article term and the latter being the populist take up of certain aspects of that production style, the careful treatment of sounds and details, into a more expansive sonic palette.

In fact, I remember going into a record store - maybe even DMC - and talking to the guy there about new minimal records and mentioning the term microhouse, probably around 2003-04 - he was like, "Microhouse? Ha, I never heard that before!" I immediately felt a bit lame afterwards...

in light of this thread i brought some of the kompakt total compilations off my shelf. total 3 is really good and i imagine it's the most loved. but a lot of the others they are not that great? i stopped after total 7 which is kind of boring. total 1 is really grating.

cool they are on spotify, i am missing a few of them

oh plus total 3 has "so weit wie noch nie" which is not as huge as tessio but is similarly grand

Microhouse always felt like a cult/cottage industry thing to me, by the time it became minimal it was this continent-eating sound that dominated for like two years.

i'm not from australia but i'm enjoying hearing memories about early 00s electronic music shops. the only vendor i really dealt much with in buying microhouse/minimal was bent crayon records in cleveland, which i would go to often when visiting home. it's still around. at least then (and i imagine still is) it was definitely a wire-reader kind of shop, though definitely skewed more toward the electronic/dance end and less toward the derek bailey/evan parker kind of shit. sold some indie too.

Total 3 and 4 are my all time favourites but I have a big big soft spot for 8 as well. Bit of a lull leading up to that though.

I came late to the Total party, so 7 was my first one and I still have some fond memories of it.

me too. i came to microhouse/minimal really late, way past its prime. probably around 2006-2008. for me it was kind of about getting reoriented with dance music after not listening to it for a good five years. i was listening to a lot of wire-ish stuff in general in 06-07 so minimal easily fit my taste at the time.

as a teenager i listened to a lot of techno/house but none of the "cool" stuff. my older brother and sister were into the mid-90s rave scene in the US but were definitely not on to whatever was critically hip at the time. i mean i'm talking fucking robert miles and euphoric piano house. that's the shit they listened to. a lot of that trickled down to me which really seemed like great, new music. when i was 18 or so i got super into danny tenaglia, his two global undergound mixes were just constantly playing in my life. but probably in college i started feeling self-conscious about that kind of stuff, it really wasn't fashionable then. i wasn't clued in enough though to know about the perlon/kompakt kind of shit being put out at the time.

but tbh all that euphoric piano house and those danny tenaglia albums are more enjoyable for me now than kompakt/minimal/micro shit. except for tessio. i can't say i listen to robert miles anymore though, lol, triggers too many teenage memories.

Actually all this stuff (microhouse, early grime, 2004-era electrohouse etc) is tied up for me in this moment where ILM, and probably the internet in general, was in a post-Soulseek pre-YouTube sweet spot, where everything was *just* accessible enough, but you had to make a bit of effort to describe things for people. What you got was this really exciting sense of mutual discovery, coupled with reading a breathless excited post and feeling like you had to download this record as quickly as possible. That's lessened a lot in the YouTube era.

OTM. I distinctly remember downloading Tessio on slsk after reading about it here.

Also, this corresponds to my experience pretty much exactly: Coming from a Warp Records / IDM background at the time (and stuff like this being very much my introduction to house), I remember people like Luomo coming up in messageboard conversation on an infrequent basis. The idea that this was a bridge for leftfield electronica fans into 'proper' dance music was quite prevalent, prob due to the Vladislav Delay connection.

I, being 16 in 2004, was only exposed to microhouse via allmusic and that "ishkur's guide to electronic music" flash site. Whereas I was only just testing the waters of dance stuff (given ridiculous teenage self-consciousness about it, vis-a-vis growing up in a milieu where dance music signified euro-trash or candy-rave schmaltz) and the only people I knew that listened to dance music were into unpalatable hard european techno. I think the fact that Tessio could bring the queeny deep house good vibez while being able to conceal those in a cerebreal Wire Mag chain reaction labcoat was definitely a boon for me at the time.

Tessio could bring the queeny deep house good vibez while being able to conceal those in a cerebreal Wire Mag chain reaction labcoat

lol, otm

Forgot half of a sentence there:

Whereas I was testing dance music waters, and friends listened to banging tribal techno, the palatability of microhouse, namely this idea that it was so detailed, made it very accessible.

Also, I think the bad lyrics and kind of essential to it. I really could not imagine more sober or poignant lyrics working on a track like this. It's sort of like how high-school poetry class ham-fistedness of New Order lyrics makes them seem really sincere, the schlockiness of Tessio vox feels almost deliberate.

totally. i mean we are talking about VOCAL HOUSE, this isn't fucking leonard cohen

Ed.b otm through and through

i mean, naming your album "vocalcity" means that you are inspired by a genre in which "YOU GONNA TOUCH THE SKY / YOU'VE EVER BEEN THIS HIGH" is a great lyric (and it is imo)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwk1qc2fs24

No one is ever going to pore over the lyrics to Tessio but they're some of the most simply effective and moving lyrics of the 00s.

oh definitely. i love all the lyrics in tessio but i think especially "for me it didn't go wrong / we just made another song"

It's all about "Synkro", really

― brimstead, Thursday, July 31, 2014 10:38 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^^

― Tim F, Friday, August 1, 2014 12:00 AM (20 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I feel like my opinion on Luomo has changed not at all, but then I never really "got" Tessio, and slightly preferred present lover to vocalcity. My perception of what people seemed to like about Vocalcity was that it kinda sounded like the music was disintegrating and the grooves were all rubbery in an awkward way—a kind of amateurish murkiness. But what I liked about it was ("Synkro" was best at this) was when the groove snapped together tightly and you gradually got a feel for the shape of the track as it evolved over time. And then what I really liked about Luomo became more apparent later:

the composition of stuff like "What Good"—the barely-there three-note background melody at 1:46 that gave the song a sense of space and distance, the particular swing of the drums, the sudden swooping key change, the unexpected keyboards, the androgynous/feminine/masculine shifts w/in the vocals....the general atmosphere. The songwriting that felt like it might be improvisatory. I know people who think it's too "music you'd hear at H&M" but i never had a problem with "music you hear at H&M" and The Present Lover was an exceptionally well-executed version of that

except "Tessio" remake which I always thought was just ok.

I also think I read an interview, and I know, the artist is dead or whatever, but I remember reading Vadislav being like, if they liked vocalcity they'll LOVE present lover, i couldn't even make it sound how i wanted...and it confirmed for me that what people liked about it was accidental amateurism, a fetishization of technology failing or w/e that obscured ideas for the forest

Also I have no problem w/ digging something "for music nerds" when its general operating procedure is "make people dance" and the tools are so unabashedly populist

like you could drop certain michael mayer cuts in the back of a reeses pieces commercial in 2019 and I bet you that shit becomes retroactively huge

I should clarify my 2nd post, it's not the amateurish murkiness i thought people liked, but the way that it had all these really small scale changes over time—the amateur-ness was a kind of compositional looseness, like it was intentionally non-repetitive—one bar wouldn't sound exactly like another. Basically an anti-repition in dance music argument. which i think is kind of an overrated thing but not a useless one

idk i'm projecting other people's fandom tho

("Synkro" was best at this) was when the groove snapped together tightly and you gradually got a feel for the shape of the track as it evolved over time

yeah this is what i love about vladislav delay's best work, it morphs so slowly you don't even realize how much a track has changed 10 minutes in.

i mean, you DO realize, but you're confused as to how it got there

"huone" is a perfect example. 15 minutes in and it's like "wait where am it"
http://youtu.be/EWZHOjfIxqk

intentionally non-repetitive—one bar wouldn't sound exactly like another. Basically an anti-repition in dance music argument. which i think is kind of an overrated thing but not a useless one

yeah idk, i really like how this approach sounds on his "solo" work (ie under the vladislav delay moniker). i don't know if he was necessarily trying to get all squarepusher w/r/t house music though

"Synkro" is the finest thing on Vocalcity for precisely the reasons cited ("She-Center" would be next for me) - whether accidental or not I think on that track Luomo really perfected this idea of groove as accumulation or a process of focusing, like early on you're too close to the groove to see it and then you ever so slowly pull back your perspective. "Synkro" is actually the tightest of the tunes on Vocalcity (well, except "The Right Wing" I suppose) in that its "morphing" feels so purposive and non-random, he's not really introducing new elements, just continually refining what's already there. In this regard it's comparable to, I dunno, Armand Van Helden's "Flowerz" or something.

So much of people's attitudes to this kind of thing are shaped by the journey they took to the music. Like, for me none of this stuff was a gateway drug because I spent basically all of 1999-2000 trying to swallow all of dance music history simultaneously and by the time I started investigating all this stuff in earnest (beyond Herbert, who I'd gotten into earlier) the idea of music being just music for dancing to was perfectly natural to me.

And yet, by the same token, dance music was still new enough to me that these particular avenues - the idea of danceable grooves as harbouring a wealth of microscopic detail - itself felt like something new and interesting and worth thinking about. If anything, my relative blind spot was not in enjoying a lot of pre-microhouse stuff but in being able to articulate that enjoyment in a way that gets at how clever the grooves are. One of the big attractions of stuff like Luomo is that as a fan his music is very easy to enthuse about, to talk about these qualities and expect other people to understand what you mean because the ideas are presented so explicitly.

Whereas if I had been a huge fan of dance music right throughout the 90s I could imagine coming to this music and being irritated by the grand claims by fans/new jacks of ground being broken - hence e.g. vahid's polemical protomicrohouse thread. But you need very "trained" ears to hear and then articulate those dynamics properly.

xp it is very dynamic music without seeming to be on the outside, kind of my personal definition of "funk" in a way, feel the same about autechre and villalobos, two other artists recently talked about on here. just to clarify from above, i love vocal tracks, i just can't quite get past the stiltedness of the vox on "tessio", like this was sort of my gateway into singers like paul st. hilaire or romanthony or byron stingily, probably not a fair or meaningful thing to compare "tessio" at all to those guys or more polished R&B-centric house vocals in english as native language. i'm going to have to revisit the album now that you all are posting cool things about it.

like early on you're too close to the groove to see it and then you ever so slowly pull back your perspective.

yeah this hits on how endlessly listenable his best stuff is (up through anima, anyway). maybe i'm just a spaced out fanboy but it really is like you're hearing things differently every time. different levels of focus, different perceptions of structure and mood.

Is

I guess you turn me on
When you do the hummm

An oral sex reference?

I mean of course it is, I don't know why I'm asking.

This song is not depressing it's beautiful. The most depressing song is whatever the last Coldplay single was and it gets more depressing each time a new one comes out.

Easy target but it does make me feel miserable. fortunately noone gave a shit about their last single.

i know dreams probably can't really be 13 minutes long but one time i dreamed a dj let all of synkro play

i know dreams probably can't really be 13 minutes long but one time i dreamed a dj let all of synkro play