Yotto - 'Nova' - Acid Stag

2019 has been a huge year for Anjunadeep alumni Otto Yliperttula, known colloquially to the public as soon-to-be house hold name Yotto. Following the launch his own label Odd One Out and subsequent release of a series of strategic tracks beginning with the effervescent ‘Shifter’, ‘Nova’ is the second strike of lightening on this Finnish producer’s path to stardom that serves to boldly catalogue that the newly christened label-head has plenty left in the bottle.

Much in tandem with its namesake, ‘Nova’ is an atmospheric slow burner of dizzying proportions that unassumingly matures into gargantuan size. Used to flesh out what has become an essential soft rebooting of the producer’s originally more introspective discography, the track effectively personifies a new direction with the appropriation of a more anthemic sound. Whilst retaining the classic syncopation of analog deep-house stabs and driving rhythms, it’s the cacophonous building of foreboding strings, the ensuing tribal percussion, and the implementation of a reverberating brass lead in the climax synonymous more so with tropes borrowed of sister-genre ‘tech-house’ that wax and wane almost analogously with Yotto’s rise to prominence itself.

All of this culminates in a breathtakingly sobering amalgamation of small iterations. The sounds payed homage are at times just as much reminiscent of the Beatport crushing antics of Australia’s class clown Fisher as they are of long beloved Rüfüs Du Sol, serving simultaneously to not only exhibit the varied wheelhouse of Yotto’s production ability, but also a smorgasbord of influences none of which sacrifice or detract from the cinematic signature that elevated him to his eminence. What results is an almost antithetically ambiguous sense of identity that feels just as much at home hypnotising a sea of nocturnal festival patrons en mass in the early hours of the morning as it would be rumbling through the isles of a cinema as the score of a new Blade Runner film premiering on the silver screen.

Whilst still much to prove yet, it’s the catalyst of this sense of duality, of producer and label-head, of rhythm and atmosphere, and of whimsy and maturity that has the potential to inaugurate Yotto in his ascension to an upper echelon amongst the Tchami‘s and Claude VonStroke’s of the industry, though anointments of which are only made for the best of the best in the pantheon of dance music greats.