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

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.

The tracks on The Present Lover are much shorter than those on Vocalcity - mostly between about five and nine minutes?

And the really long tracks on Vocalcity really *do* change quite substantially over the course of their length. Even something ultra-minimal like "The Right Wing" has all sorts of stuff going on. Now I couldn't imagine them being any shorter.

It's ok! We'll make it better!

I guess you make me warm
when you do the harm,
making everybody calm,
getting creative with your charm.
I'm trying to be all yours;
although I ain't answering your calls.
Don't say it's false;
I'm only following my thoughts.

Baby it's ok,
we'll make it better.
Baby, I, I'll survive,
without these women in my life.

The Present Lover seems to do this to people, doesn't it? You either find it completely flat and hookless or...well, the best thing ever.

Vintage Tim Finney here :)

i sing the lyrics slightly different to how Michael transcribed them there and i'm not entirely sure that he's right and i'm wrong. ha! did you just transcribe them from a close listen, Michael?

also what's the muffled movie dialogue at the beginning of the track from? i have an idea it might be from Hal Hartley's "Trust" and might possibly be the same excerpt Pilote used on his fantastic track "The Dialogue".

anyway i'm not so sure anymore but have a listen and tell me what you think.

i like:

"...making everybody come
getting creative with your charm..."

melancholy hedonism. or something.

"I'm the Present, true lover. Could you be mine? MOST MOMENT!"

MOST MOMENT

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