INTERVIEW WITH LUOMO

Finland’s Sasu Ripatti has a musical output that has always been as varied as the monikers he's used, and it still is. Releasing on labels like “Chain Reaction”, “Mille Plateaux”, “Leaf” as well as on his own “Huume Recordings” since the late nineties, 2011 has been a prolific year for him. And, suffice to say, his varied output shows the man’s many musical interests. The LP on “Honest Jon’s Records” by his new project “Vladislav Delay Quartet” is mostly acoustic music taking in influences from jazz, noise, ambient and electronics. The “Latoma EP” (Echocord) shows Ripatti’s personal take on dub techno. Furthermore, “Halo Cyan Records” re-issued some early Sistol work spread over two releases by the end of 2010. This year also sees the return of Luomo, Ripatti’s house alias. Ahead of the release of “Plus” (album on Moodmusic) and two performances in September on The Hague’s “Today’s Art” festival, we caught up with him to get a better insight of the man and his output.

You have many aliases. Each one seems to represent an musical idea or direction and some of them (Conoco & Sistol) seem more or less on hold.

"It’s practical more than anything else. I work in so many styles of music that releasing everything under one name wouldn’t make much sense. It’s also for me to distinguish different projects whilst making them, as much as for people who buy (well, listen to) the music. They are different concepts, projects, whatever, so they should have their own identity in names as well. In the past it was also just a funny thing to do to come up with strange names for the “artist”. Conoco, for example, only released one 12” ever."


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