The annoying thing about defining an era is that you can never quite escape it afterwards. Vocalcity is one of a small fraternity of turn-of-the-century electronic records that slightly older music nerd types absolutely lose their minds over, for reasons rarely unclear to either the modern, hip, handsome listener or myself. If you'll indulge me for a moment, an esoteric analogy for the place of this stuff in the world: in one of the Matrix sequels (the one with the two dreaded, dreaded albino twins), there's a scene where the aforementioned twins have to make an escape from a very fancy house. They run out through a door, which closes just before Neo is able to get to it. Opening it a second later, he's greeted by an entirely different world out there - some really, really poorly-rendered mountains or something like that. Like hilariously, immersion-destroyingly so. It's bad and would never fly today. But the idea of that scene has totally stuck with me - if there was a way to phrase doors which, when opened, reveal a new world each time more catchily, I'd list it as one of my greatest interests. I seriously think about that scene, and the lovely worlds-within-worlds idea that it opened my lil mind to, all the time.

Vocalcity is the same way. The packaging, physical and sonic, is outdated - whether being poorly copied to no end or becoming the de facto sound of shampoo commercials is a worse fate, you can decide - but the subconscious joys of listening to it are as strong as ever. I've never been to an underground dance club in Gothenburg in the year 2002 (or at any other point), but should I want to then walking around listening to Vocalcity will get me as close as anything else.

Highlights: Tessio, Market, The Right Wing