Vocalcity
Luomo is the newest alias of the artist known best as Vladislav Delay, whose austerely minimalist dub-influenced tech-house is the stock in trade of the Chain Reaction and (to a lesser extent) Mille Plateaux labels. The extent to which fans of that sound are interested in this release should be partly the extent to which their tastes extend to the application of that aesthetic to vocal house-music tracks, which is what Mille Plateaux's Force Tracks imprint was created to explore. Although the more abstract house producers have often treated singers as source material hardly different from the electronic elements of the mix, the notion that vocals represent a "human" element, or at least a connection to the world of song, is hard to shake. Luomo may indeed shake you of that idea, as the vocals are just another one of the many layers on these dense tracks, often not appearing until after many minutes of slow accretion of sounds, at which time a few words or phrases are electronically processed and looped endlessly. All of which makes the track "Tessio" even more startling, when a full-fledged multi-voiced R&B; song worthy of the Paradise Garage suddenly appears. Even from a musician who has been heading in a half-dozen directions at once over the past year, this is quite a surprising release.-Bob Bannister