"Tessio" is the Sound of Someone You Love Walking Away Forever

In the HEARTBREAKERS series, we look at the dance floor tearjerkers that make your night special, whether that's at the height of your high or the plateau. Electronic music has the power to break hearts and this is an appreciation of those songs.

I never drank as a teenager. I never smoked as a teenager. I never went out as a teenager. I never had sex as a teenager. I rarely left the house as a teenager. I spent those precious years posting absolute bollocks on an NME messageboard where half the regulars thought I was a 41 year old trucker who was just posing as a sad teenager from rural north Norfolk for a laugh. And as sad as that is, even sadder is the fact that in many ways that place changed my life. It was through that forum that I fell in love for the first time. That love was microhouse.

Microhouse, a term coined by Philip Sherburne, married the sparsity of minimal techno to the glitchy hyper-precision of all the clicks & cuts bollocks that bald blokes in heavy glasses liked at the turn of the century. It was house that didn't need to be heard in a club to work properly. It was deep and lush, forlorn and pristine. Mixes like Triple R's "Friends" and Superpitcher's "Today" were romantic, rolling portraits of a moment in time, records that introduced me to artists like Ada, Luciano and Robag Whrume and labels like Trapez, Freude Am Tamzen and Playhouse.

A pivotal moment in my life: swapping my CD of Burned Mind by Wolf Eyes – an album I once, for some reason, lent to my best friend's girlfriend during a GCSE art lesson – for Michael Mayer's Immer and the Kompakt Total 4 compilation. Admittedly it's been a while since I dug out the latter, but Mayer's mix remains my favourite of all time.

Dance music rarely produces worthwhile artist albums. There's the odd exception of course, and to my mind the most obvious of these is Luomo's Vocalcity. First released on Force Tracks in 2000 and reissued to justified fanfare in 2004 by Huume, it's an undoubted microhouse masterpiece: diving bell deep house that sounds simultaneously monumental and shattered. Luomo is Sasu Ripatti, aka Vladislav Delay. His material under the guise is an attempt at imagining what house is like to the uninitiated. It pulses and weaves, aches with desire. Each of the six lengthy tracks is an object lesson in the importance of sound design. Every hi-hat is perfectly placed, every bubbling bassline weighted just right, every vocal hiccup expertly deployed. The real winner though is the track I want to talk about - "Tessio"

"Tessio" is the sound of someone you love walking away forever. It feels like being submerged in Lake Baikal. It sounds like the saddest song ever written. Every second of its twelve minutes positively throbs with longing. Built around a titanic bassline, the most hypnotic hi-hat pattern ever committed to CD and immaculately echoed iced-out chords, it's a testament to the stunning powers of minimalism.

Then there's the vocal.

House isn't known for lyrical ingenuity. It's functional music and a dancefloor isn't a space for reflection - which makes "Tessio" even more heartbreaking. The provenance of the vocalists is an irrelevance. They aren't listed on my copy of the album. I don't who they are. I don't care that their vocal is slightly flat. It doesn't matter that written down it all looks a little trite. What matters is the effect it has over me, the continuing power of it, my everlasting rapacious desire to be enveloped by the record.

I stopped caring about the cleverness – or more accurately the supposed cleverness – of lyricists when I was about seventeen. By then I'd dropped off the MSN Messenger scene and didn't need to try and impress anyone with a well chosen line or two as a screen name. I crave simplicity. I need them to be relatable without falling into Elbow sized obviousness. This is why "Tessio" chimes so strongly with me. It's what you want it to be: could be the story of love gone sour, could be about something that was only ever imagined by one half of a couple that never was, could be anything. It's a song of reassurance, of defiance, acceptance and denial; the hopelessness of falling in love. It's crushingly sad. But it's also the greatest microhouse record ever made.

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