Luomo - Tessio Remixes Pt. 2

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  • When British renegade artists The Chapman Brothers took a set of mint Goya prints and painted clown faces and puppy heads over the 19th century printmaker's original work, the art world cried foul. Rebelliousness and irreverence make good art, some said—but not when the transgression costs the world physically irreplaceable source material. There was similar outrage here on RA when the first round of Tessio Remixes dropped. Luomo's 2000 original has become sort of an international treasure of vocal minimal house—the first, the brightest, the best. So when Stimming and Spektre stepped up to remix the track, everybody was all WTF and then LMFAO and then QQ. "Stimming remixes are awful," "original is amazing, all the remixes are terrible nonsense," "horrible and awful way to butcher a classic track…" and so on. Despite the naysayers, German minimalist Bülent Gürler, AKA Butch, now takes a turn, no doubt prepared for the Frankfurter roast that's going to ensue in the comments below this review. But where Stimming, for all his talents, erroneously focused on the foreground of the original, Butch gets it right: the longevity of a Luomo track resides in the cavernous negative space between the between the beats. On the "Sunrise Remix," Butch takes Sasu Ripatti out of his rainy Finnish flat for a morning comedown in Ibiza. The spaciousness of the original remains, as does the sentimental acoustic picking, now buoyed along by a clappier percussion line and strangely human sort of warmth. It doesn't top the original but it sits comfortably alongside it. The dub cut, however? It's basically the same thing with some corny steel drums and bongos with an extended boop-boop break that starts around minute 4:00 and never relents. Way less effective. Great Stuff pinch hitter Ramon Tapia also takes a swing and misses wider than either the Stimming/Spektre cuts or the ill-advised dub cut. Tapia makes it all clicks-n-cutsy, with no charisma or low-end. The most amazing part of the original, Johanna Livanainen's bottomlessly sexy vocals, are truncated and deflated to answering-machine versions of themselves and the beat basically sounds like two pieces of toast being rubbed together. So, to recap. Stimming = meh. Spektre = no. Butch's mix = yes, his dub = no. And Ramon Tapia = hell no. Is that about right guys? Sounds to me like talented producers ought to leave this one alone until they have something really valuable to add to the canon. Luckily, unlike a set of Francisco Goya etchings now defaced by The Brothers Chapman forever, we can all just go back to the original Luomo album, which still sounds as deep, sensual and elusive as ever.
  • Tracklist
      B2 Tessio (Ramon Tapia Remix) B1 Tessio (Butch Dub) A Tessio (Butch Sunrise Remix)
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