There are few artists who embody the sound of Scandinavian house quite like Bjørn Torske. The Norwegian producer has spent the best part of two decades dispensing loose, dubbed-out grooves through his own Full Pupp label—run alongside Prins Thomas—and the Smalltown Supersound family that has carried his albums. Ramma EP is his latest dispatch for Full Pupp, a vinyl-and-streaming three-tracker that finds him in familiarly strange form: drums that sway rather than march, melodies that drift in and out of focus, and a sense of humour that never quite lets the record take itself seriously.
Opening track Bommelom sets the tone over its seven minutes, a head-nodding groove built from a soft-focus kick and a bassline that lollops along like it’s been up all night. The pads arrive in thick, smeared layers, drenched in dub-style delay until the edges blur, and percussion skitters around the beat with a charming lack of urgency. It’s house music, certainly, but house music made somewhere far from the grid. Rukenissens hevn (Trym Søvdsnes Remix) is the odd one out—a remix of a track whose original sits elsewhere—and Søvdsnes’ version sharpens the focus, its chords brighter, its four-to-the-floor beat more insistent, the closest the EP comes to a conventional dancefloor tool.
The centrepiece, though, is Tom Rull, an 11-and-a-half-minute slow burner that justifies the record’s existence on its own. It opens on little more than a heartbeat of percussion and a bass pulse, then lets a single, deeply reverent synth line wander into the frame around the three-minute mark. From there it expands with remarkable patience: hats tick in, a second chord leans against the first, and the whole thing settles into a sway that feels less like a build and more like the track simply deciding it’s comfortable where it is. It never peaks, never resolves—it just exists, and it’s utterly absorbing.
Ramma is a modest record in the best sense: three tracks, no grand gestures, no need to prove anything. Torske has made weirder, wilder music elsewhere in his catalogue, but this EP is a welcome reminder of how distinctive his version of house remains. Put Tom Rull on late in the evening, loud enough to feel the bass, and watch the room slow down. That’s the whole point, and he’s still the master of it.
