Luomo vs. Uusitalo vs. Vladislav Delay
Janet Leyton-Grant tracks down reclusive Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti.
Sasu Ripatti, conspicuously enigmatic for ten years, is coming out of his shell. Despite his notorious wariness of the publicity machine, he has agreed to do an interview in the lead-up to the release of his new Uusitalo album ‘Karhunainen’. Even more surprising – I've been invited to his house.
It’s a rainy, late-summer morning in Berlin when Ripatti opens the door of his Prenzlauer Berg home studio, apologises wryly for the mess, and ushers me past the bathroom, kitchen and into his living room/bedroom.
Friendly and relaxed, he makes tea and makes small talk easily, that is until a camera is pulled out. He flinches, and refuses any photos. "Last week I had a photo shoot – it was a horrible experience, I really wouldn’t like to repeat it now."
Ripatti is a shy boy from Oulu in Northern Finland, a remote city best known for metal bands and as the birthplace of the Air Guitar World Championships. He began making music in Oulu before moving to Helsinki, and then to Berlin, soon after the Luomo album ‘Vocalcity’ (Force Tracks) and the early Vladislav Delay explorations on Chain Reaction and Mille Plateaux.
While his partner Antye Greie (AGF) works in the studio, Ripatti explains that when he started out making electronic music in the late '90s he was very careful to guard his real name – Luomo and Vladislav Delay are the most well known of several aliases – but he has recently had a change of heart. “When somebody sends you a plane ticket to Japan under the name Vladislav Delay and you miss your flight, it's gone too far,” he says. “I didn’t want to fake it anymore.” Now for the first time, the press releases for ‘Karhunainen’ even have his real name, Sasu Rippatti, written on them.
Using his own name is also a strategy to connect his various identities in the minds of the music-buying public, many of whom have picked up his vocal house records as Luomo but don't even know his Uusitalo and Vladislav Delay records exist. It's almost a marketing strategy, and he clearly remains uncomfortable about it. “Any kind of public persona is…not what I would like to be. But I understand that sometimes you have to do something like that to help selling even whatever, ten records in Australia cause otherwise you sell only one.”
The first Uusitalo album, ‘Vapaa Muurari’, was a 2000 Chain Reaction release. A one-off. The project seemed as defunct as Ripatti's other pseudonyms Sistol and Conoco until, with a typical spurt of prolificacy, he revived it last year. Two albums and a live set in Berlin within twelve months. Why was Uusitalo resurrected? Nothing more than a convenient alias picked from existing ones, says Ripatti, useful for labelling his beat-driven, club-oriented music.
"Any kind of public persona is…not what I would like to be. "
But while Sistol and Conoco will likely remain in the past, (“I don’t see a point in bringing them back,”) Ripatti has firmly established Uusitalo as the third circle in the Venn diagram of his oeuvre, overlapping both the dark and shadowy electronics of Vladislav Delay and the shining, aberrant house of Luomo with as close to 4/4 as could be expected from an artist with arrhythmic affiliations. “With my Vladislav Delay recordings, that’s I guess my most ‘me’,” he explains as we sip green tea, “I don’t have to produce myself, I don't have to think, it just really pours out. And then with Luomo I have to work quite hard I mean, because of the lyrics, because of the vocals, and collaborating with people is quite demanding. But even with Uusitalo, because I’m not a club-head, I like producing club music, but it doesn't come out automatically. It's more like I have to think like what works for me in that state or…medium.”
On the new Uusitalo album, ‘Karhunainen’, Ripatti hooks into the club’s 4/4 and bass drum, doing to techno what Luomo did to house.
But, amazingly for a dance-oriented music making Berlin resident, Ripatti really doesn’t like going to clubs. “I don’t know if it’s the non-musicality or easiness, there’s something that I just don’t connect with,” he says by way of explanation.
“I’ve never been a clubber. I mean I’ve never gone to clubs and discos, but I’ve never thought DJs were great. I don’t come from that side of things. I come from playing jazz and taking music seriously. And at the same time I like punk. Or anything. But this dance music, really just press play and raise your hands in the air and do drugs, or whatever, I mean, drugs I did, but all the DJ stuff I didn’t.”
When pressed about the dance music, he concedes that Richie Hawtin’s set at this year's DEMF was good, but he otherwise delves into the past to dig up examples of clubland inspiration. Profan before Kompakt started, Chain Reaction, Maurizio, Carl Craig. “But I haven't been inspired in a long time. I’m inspired that somebody gets a really nice deal for their chk-chk-chk-chk track, that’s what I’m impressed by, but not by the music.”
Instead, Ripatti’s inspiration comes from where he began: jazz. “As always, I’ve been, and I am very inspired by jazz. That’s my deepest love. I really like all kinds of music from punk and rock to pop music. I listen to lots of hip-hop and even commercial hip-hop. From reggae to classical to…almost everything. But jazz is definitely the main thing.”
Ripatti's discomfort with the scene that embraces him extends to his own music, too. Trained as a jazz percussionist, he played in bands before discovering experimental electronics and the creative freedom of sequencing and software, but the percussive declarations of ‘Karhunainen’ withdraw from the digitalism he’s spent the last decade exploring. “After a while it really started to put me off, and maybe that's also the reason why I don’t find current music so interesting," he explains. "You can already hear that he’s using this plug-in and this preset and there’s not much more to it, there’s no personal stamp, there’s no mistakes, there’s no dirt, there’s no …no …I don't know. It’s too clean.”
Now using software only to record in the studio and to mix live sets, he’s wary of being an analogue purist, but is reluctant to “just press play and take the easy way out. I’m pushing myself again to take more out of less, rather than the other way around.” To that end, Ripatti’s been putting time into playing drums again. The large, sparsely furnished room is scattered with the kind of percussion fallout used for ‘Karhunainen’ – parts of a kit, and drumsticks, a child’s toy instruments.
"I’m inspired that somebody gets a really nice deal for their chk-chk-chk-chk track, that’s what I’m impressed by, but not by the music.”
The themes that Ripatti engages with on as Uusitalo ('new house' in Finnish) also cast back into his past. In a move that is hardly likely to shift units in middle America, everything from the titles to the liner notes is written in his mother tongue. “Maybe it’s cause I’ve been away from Finland, or home, but I thought that this Uusitalo thing from now on will be something like my Finnish project where I keep things a little bit like Finland.” It's a back to the roots approach which even gets a little personal - he included excerpts from the literary works of his father and grandmother, both well-known Finnish writers, on both last year’s ‘Tulenkantaja’ and the forthcoming ‘Karhunainen’. “I respect a lot the work of them both and ah, and I like to say it with samples,” he laughs.
The enigmatic Sasu Ripatti offering up family stories for public scrutiny - it seems we've come a long way. He shifts awkwardly in the swivel armchair making it squeak piercingly, and offers more tea from the pot on the flight-case coffee table between us.
Even performing live, he says, is “a challenge, because I just really feel uncomfortable in front of people, being in the spotlight, but then again, all these years I’ve been doing it I’ve started being able to deal with that and I try to filter through all my personal stuff and I try to take advantage of this interaction and – I started to like it. I mean nowadays I can sometimes even look at the people.”
He recognises that his distaste for PR is an obstacle in his career. Early on, in an attempt to eliminate the need for compromise, Ripatti set up a non-music related company with friends in Finland to support his creative endeavours, but the experiment failed. He was miserable without enough time to make music. “When you’re creatively involved with something you care about strongly, and it becomes also your living, it’s a little bit difficult.”
It’s raining in grim earnest outside when the conversation turns to record companies. Ripatti has released on majors, independents and his own label, but clearly he's happiest on the latter. Following the success of Vocalcity on Force Tracks in 2000, Ripatti was courted by BMG, who saw commercial potential in the second Luomo album, 'Present Lover'. The BMG experience left him bitter. “They start telling you what you should do to sell the record and... I just purely told them to fuck off. I just couldn’t collaborate with them to do the kind of stuff that they ask Madonna to do when we are selling only a few thousand records. I mean it just doesn’t serve the purpose. I didn't want to make a fool out of myself. But I guess they managed to still make me look like a fool in many ways.” BMG even forced Ripatti to make a commercial video for ‘Tessio’, a project which ended up looking like, truth be told, a deodorant commercial. But the problems didn’t end there.
“These assholes in the end wouldn’t let me release the album in many parts of the world because they wanna hold everything. They reserve the rights for the whole of the world, but then when the marketing director in the States or Japan or where the fuck ever say ‘this is not selling enough’, they don't release it. But you can’t release it either, nor anybody else, so in the end actually there were many parts of the world where it could have sold a lot, France, many parts of Europe, the UK, but it was never released there.”
“People couldn’t get the album. That’s the only thing I’m really furious about, that they are so fucking stupid. I mean I’m not blaming them, but they’re still fucking stupid in their structure, cause they are a big mechanism, a big machine and just can’t work flexibly,” he fumes.
"I’ve never been a clubber. I come from playing jazz and taking music seriously."
The sinking of Mille Plateaux/Force Inc also left scars. “We all kind of ended up less than happy, and I wanted to make music but I really just couldn’t trust anyone at that point in time.”
Ripatti solved the problem by resurrecting his own label, Huume, which he has been releasing his music on independently since 2004. It’s the most comfortable situation, he says, but he’s reluctant to spend time and effort on promotion. “I can see how I could probably sell more records and make a reasonable thing out of this, but then I wouldn’t be making music anymore.”
“Maybe one day I’ll come up with an album that has more selling potential than I can do with my set-up, so maybe I will licence to BMG," he laughs. "But I can’t see that happening anytime soon. And I think these BMGs, they are not going to have much future. It’s like an animal dying.”
“The bottom line is, when I look at it and forget about the fact that it's my bread there and it might not be there for long anymore, I find the current situation interesting and fresh, all the problems and difficulties being positive challenges. But, then again when it’s my own personal thing in there that I truly care about then, that’s really hard.”
“Cause I’m so much just about music. I care personally so much about it that there’s so many things I just can’t deal with very easily. It’s, ah, it’s rough stuff,” he says with emotion.
What’s the solution? Torn between what the music he’s so passionate about and the publicity games he despises, Ripatti has come up with an idea: “I want to be a bit more distant from this whole thing. To be in the centre of this thing here in Berlin, I’m reminded every day too much of the things I don’t want to do.”
This is the plan. Come spring, he’ll leave Berlin behind and seclude himself in Finland once again. “I want to go somewhere else for a moment and just really concentrate on the music because I, that’s the only thing I can, I can really …”
He trails off, stuttering like the stabbing ebb-and-flow lyrics of Luomo. Shrewd enough to do interviews that will promote his music; too idealistic and passionate to buy into the game full time. But he’s planning a more danceable Luomo album even as he prepares for withdrawal into North European isolation. Sasu Ripatti’s attacks will continue beyond this retreat.
"Three months of almost daily listening and ‘Whistleblower’ is still forming and deforming in my ears. How much music has that force?"
"Sasu has finally achieved the Luomo that both he and we needed this whole time. It’s been a messy trek, but wonderfully satisfying, in the end." "'Tulenkantaja' is satsifyingly unstable disco music, often as engaging as any of Ripatti's work and therefore well worth investigating."
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