Luomo - "Paper Tigers"

Sasu Ripatti makes pushing boundaries sound so simple. Always has, going back to his earliest work under his first nom-de-guerre Vladislav Delay, and later under the guise of Luomo. The Delay material, best described as glacial dubscapes, expanded the boundaries of epic techno beyond the ten-minute barrier to the limits of a compact disc. Keeping forward motion in mind, Delay tweaks his beats, expanding and contracting them seemingly at will, but always on time, most effectively on his later material, Anima and The Four Quarters. Under the Luomo guise, Ripatti literally blew the doors off of house music with Vocalcity, incorporating the clicks-n-cuts aesthetic which was so prevalent around the turn of the millennium into the soul of Chicago house. A revolution was born. Follow up The Present Lover took a 45-degree turn to Vocalcity by pushing vocals to the fore.

Paper Tigers, the latest from the Finnish master, cements Luomo's place at the front of the house vanguard, refining his approach of combining glitch with the almighty pulsing beat. Johanna Iivanainen's vocals soar in places, get dubbed out and cut up in others, but remain the unifying element of the entire album. The lyrics are completely banal, but like most of the genre, they are not meant to be particularly meaningful, and therefore get a pass. "Really Don't Mind," the single, is indicative of the album - sounding like Ripatti wrote a straight up house track and then tore it all the way down, rebuilding it with only the most compelling elements. Somehow it retains a house feel while also feeling strangely alien, disorienting. "Wanna Tell," the second-half highlight, builds a driving rhythm slowly over its nearly eight minutes, only to hit an oil slick halfway through as the beats hang a right hand turn to the tempo and the melody chases after it. Iivanainen's vocals can't twist with it either and the facade of traditional house music that this album claims as its foundation is revealed to be a malevolent doppelganger. If this track is spun in a club, watch for some serious stumbling on the dancefloor. Hilarity will ensue.

Does this get played in clubs? I can imagine an idealized, adventurous DJ spinning tracks like these, but I don't think that it is too common. Which is too bad. The Luomo catalogue should work wonders on the dancefloor, but it doesn't have the easy, anthemic quality of most house blockbusters. This is a good thing. The best music challenges the times, encourages innovation in its wake. Ripatti did his share, the onus is on you.

Monolake - "Plumbicon Versions"

Plumbicon Verions contains five remixes of a track from Polygon_Cities, four of them previously released on vinyl. The original version does not appear here and as such, this reviewer has no reference to it and is therefore unable to compare these remixes to the original.

The "Live in Osaka" mix contains minimal bleeping and blooping over Blade Runner string stabs and Chain Reaction dubby keyboards over a relentless Hawtin-esque beat. Henke remixes his own material here to great effect. Not having heard the original, this track sounds pretty solid on its own. Sleeparchive's remix ("Sleeparchive Interpretation") is a straight up Berlin house track that probably sounds fine in a club. At home, it is an endurance test. Lacking a hook but featuring bleeping and pinging sine waves, plus a voice repeating "mono," the track is so stripped down and minimal that there is very little to latch on to over nine grueling minutes. If hyper-minimal house is your bag, this will fit comfortably in it. If not, no amount of repetition is going to make this sound any better. The "Rebreather Mix" takes an entirely different tack, aiming for the emotional response, a more intellectual than physical response, and hits every mark. Evoking Portishead, the string and gentle piano arrangement couples with a dubbed-out beat and sounds like the opening credits to the most amazing sci-fi/cop-western/love story ever filmed. Deadbeat's version fills in the gaps of the other versions, filling things out nicely with nimbly cut-up beats and lush keyboards. Probably the most "classic" sounding track, the most inline with IDM jack-booted lock-steppers. "Plumbicon Epiqlogue," the closer, clocks in at over 10 minutes and reminds you that while engaging remixers is nice and all, some things are better when the original artist works on his own material. Slowed down and menacing, Henke and T++ push themselves closer to the edges and find the beauty and subtlety in the groove.

Lacunae - "Collapse" (on igloomag.com)

Normally, this reviewer is unmoved by the spoken-word-over-idm genre, finding that the two principal elements never match up evenly. Either the spoken word material is glitched out to the point of incomprehensibility, or the music simply overpowers the words. For reference points of both extremes, see Laub's Filesharing and Vladislav Delay's project The Dolls. Lacunae unfortunately are also unable to find the balance, perhaps due to their unconventional and gimmicky work ethic. The members of Lacunae have never meet in person. Tracks originate with Kasten Searles, who creates basic vocals and ambience, then sends the tapes to Arson Bright, who creates arrangements for Kasten's tracks. From there, the tapes are sent to A. Paluso, who tweaks and mixes the recordings into a cohesive whole.
Such is the process which produced Collapse, their second full-length effort. Overall the electronics are somewhat muted, trip-hoppy in places, evoking the lazy and hazy atmospherics of Massive Attack on "Rebuild in Black," crashed into the twitchy skittering beats of Arovane or Funkstörung. "Eight Zero One," placed firmly in the middle of the album, is the stand-out track. A Gary Numan-esque synth bass pulses underneath simple Adult. beats and grooves so effortlessly that the rest of the album can only be a letdown. Which unfortunately it is.

If Collapse is anything, it is too long, even at 43 minutes. There's too much filler, such as the 53-second long tracks "Giving Up," "Arms of an Ideal," and "An Image of Itself." Even the opener, "Your Surface" wallows in unintelligible vocals and sub-Richard James textures. While generally well produced and sonically interesting, the tracks do very little to differentiate themselves and as a result become more than a little numbing. Kasten's vocals rarely graduate from whispering or speaking into singing. The music never transcends its influences. The band never rise to their potential. While not a great album, there are moments of greatness on Collapse, such as the aforementioned "Eight Zero One" or in the gentle reverbed piano on "From Dust." There are not enough moments like that to really recommend this album. Maybe next time.

Hammock - "Raising Your Voice...Trying To Stop An Echo"

Hammock continue to amaze. Building on the ambient soundscape experiments of Sleep-Over, Vol. 1 and their already-excellent melodic songwriting skills, Raising Your Voice...Trying to Stop an Echo expands Hammock's artistic reach with its anthemic shoegaze (the title track), and with soothing instrumentals ("When the Sky Pours Down Like a Fountain"). Hammock's music is serene, blissed-out, and introspective at the same time. The bluesy guitar licks and brushed drums that introduce "Losing You to You" set a somber tone, but the fuzzed-out guitar drones and what sounds like steel guitar take the track to unimagined heights of orgasmic joy. Many of the newer shoegazers take their music only so far, releasing entire albums of amps buzzing (see Sunn 0)))), but Hammock take a different approach by tapping into their melodic sensibilities, and thereby perform on a higher level than many of their contemporaries. With Raising Your Voice, Hammock leave behind the dream pop scene from whence they came, and become a band creating truly unique music -- transcendent shoegaze. Evidence for this claim? See "Floating Away in Every Direction," with its sweeping melody soaring over a charming plucked motif, or the gentle elegy that is "Take a Drink from My Hands." Hammock are at the top of their game, and musing on the question of where they can take their music from here is very exciting.

Legendary Pink Dots - "A Perfect Mystery"

Firmly in their psychedelic- goth period, A Perfect Mystery is one of the more conventional and enjoyable releases in Legendary Pink Dots' extensive discography. The album settles into a pattern where songs begin with a slow, atmospheric start and then increase instrumentation, which turns up the musical tension and explodes in a trippy fury of mad, whirling, musical dervishes, with Edward Ka-Spel's foreboding lyrics wavering over everything. It all comes together perfectly on "Pain Bubbles," where the Silver Man's swirling keyboards and Niels Van Hoorn's sax dance around each other over a pulsating beat. A gentle exception to the pattern, and a standout track, is the gentle groover "Blue," a spacey guitar-and-drums ballad that mutates into ambient dub that evokes drummer Ryan Moore's side project, Twilight Circus Dub Sound System. "When I'm with You" shows the rockier side of the group, a slow groover that intensifies and peaks majestically with an outstanding sax solo. The only misstep is the apocalyptic Appalachian chant "Skeltzer Speltzer." a psychedelic hoedown that sounds like Malcolm Mooney-era Can, but at one-quarter speed. Overall an excellent introduction to the band. Those not afraid of mildly challenging material should dive in enthusiastically. Note that the vinyl version of this album contains different mixes than the compact disc, and also includes an additional track.