Skip to content
Premieres

Hear Renaissance Man’s Sinister Cellular Ode ‘Call2Call’

Renaissance Man

Last week, the New York Times reported that the Finnish phone maker Nokia’s fortunes are finally turning around, and this week, the Finnish duo Renaissance Man premiere another cut from their Call2Call EP on Turbo, which finagles telephonic bleep and buzz into six emphatically funky club cuts with an impressive signal-to-noise ratio. Coincidence, or a suggestion of insider shenanigans?

We’ll leave that up to the SEC, but there’s no doubt about the record’s potential to move butts, if not markets, fusing as it does the hair-raising analog frequencies of electro revivalists like Dopplereffekt and i-F with Neptunes-inspired clicks and clatter. “We’re both big electro fans since a long time,” explains Renaissance Man’s Ville Haimala, “and it felt it was the right time to finally write stuff like that. We wanted to take our music back to the club after the less clubby album. And we wanted to craft something dirty and bleepy and not 4/4 to counteract the safe cleanliness and straightness of a lot of dance music right now.”

The telephonic theme came about accidentally, he says, “just by experimenting with some noises we’ve recorded. At some point it started to feel like the whole record should be dedicated to telemarketing, call centers and email scammers, sort of the shadier side of communication.” They even sampled phone conversations of Jamaican e-mail scammers from YouTube; the results are dark, deliciously gritty, and perfect for the ringtone on your next burner.

The Call2Call EP is out on Tiga’s Turbo Recordings on January 28.