Vladislav Delay (Sasu Ripatti) is a techno producer from Finland who
writes lengthy ambient pieces that employ
slow-motion, icey dub-like reverbs and jazz-like improvisations cast in a
digital landscape of samples, glitches, analog waves, and complex bass lines.
His cubism of melodic and rhythmic fragments first appeared on
the EP The Kind of Blue (Huume, 1997).
The live
Ele (Sigma Editions, 1999) already contained two of his masterpieces,
Kohde and Ele .
Entain (Mille Plateaux, 2000) reprises those two tracks from
Ele,
Kohde (21 minutes) and Ele (17 minutes),
and adds
Poiko (19 minutes) and Notke (17 minutes).
The psychological aspect of Delay's art is embodied in
Kohde's minimalist pulsation of subdued, watery, organic patterns
that slowly begin to interact and refract each other, while the background
of glitches becomes more visible and slowly moves to the foreground.
The ambient calm of Ele is swept by swampy beats, like the sounds of
someone rowing a boat.
Poiko feels like a distant tremor of breezes and solar flares that picks up debris along the way, as it circles and radiates and vanishes.
Notke concocts industrial polyrhythms and quasi-dub steps
out of specks of dust.
The EP Kemikoski (Sigma, 1999), credited to Conoco contains three pieces
that demonstrate his aesthetics of loops and glitches that destabilize each other.
Past the confused techno-glitch of Keppi,
Ventola (13:07) implements an intriguing fusion of industrial and ambient music, evoking machines that communicate in a secret code of glacial pulses and sensual melodic clouds; while
Kemikoski (20:53) is a liquid sub-bass industrial dance that seems to
be performed in a junkyard of malfunctioning machinery.
Multila (Chain Reaction, 2000 - Huume, 2007) veered towards a more
dynamic (even melodramatic) kind of music. For example,
Ranta could be a horror soundtrack (a horde of rodents chewing on a
corpse); Raamat evokes some kind of decomposing organism; and
the dense revolving tapestry of Karha feels like an asteroid traveling
through empty space.
Huone is even a majestic 22-minute techno juggernaut, finally shaking
the groundfloor instead of drilling into the psyche, and a seven minute
intermezzo of pure noise does not damage the catchy pulsation at all.
Viite, instead, returns to Ele's swampy theme, and
the magnificent, incendiary turbulence of Pietola has a repetitive and undulating undercurrent that is reminiscent of Terry Riley's minimalism (like most
of Ele).
Luomo is Delay's lighter, fun, childish, disco project.
Vocalcity (Forcetracks, 2000) collects all of the house EPs:
Market (12 minutes),
Class (12 minutes),
Synkro (14 minutes,
The Right Wing (16 minutes),
Tessio (12 minutes),
She-Center (10 minutes).
Uusitalo is yet another moniker for Onnekas. This time, on the double album
Vapaa Muurari Live (Force, 2000), he performs four lengthy techno (or,
at least, "groove-oriented") suites
(Notke 2, Terra, Serti, Lunni)
that recall Terry Riley's Persian Surgery Dervishes, minus the
spirituality and plus the beats.
Anima (Mille Plateaux, 2001 - Huume, 2008)
is a 61-minute electronic poem, a prime
example of digital soundscaping that draws inspiration from both
musique concrete and industrial music. Its structure is fundamentally the
structure of a collage. There is a logic, though, in the way the collage is
assembled. Delay tries consistently to maintain a grip on his listener's
psyche. Melodic fragments and disjointed noises coexist and blend into each
other in a sort of "call and response" format: for each languid chord there is
a "choir" of tiny dissonances. The contrast creates waves of meaning. The music
"talks", at times frantically. But mostly it talks in a subliminal way, through
a stream of consciousness of cryptic sounds. The piece is as much a
philosophical meditation as a sonic exploration.
Naima (Staubgold, 2002) documents Delay's live performance at Ars Electronica Klangpark 2001, and by far his most experimental album (with references to Morton Subotnick's free-form electronica and Robert Ashley-ian conversational operas).
Demo(n)tracks (Huume, 2004) contains
13 impressionistic electronic vignettes that, altogether, constitute
a meandering (although mostly soothing) glitch-ambient-dub symphony.
Delay shows an uncanny ability to craft unfriendly chaotic soundscapes.
The harsh moments, like Kaikki Hyvin and
Kohmeesa Alt, border on power electronics.
The dance beat rarely becomes prominent. Even when it's visible, like in
Onttola, it stands shyly in the background.
However, too much sounds amateurish, and some kitschy "songs" sabotage
the admosphere (Kainuu sounds like a remix of lounge jazz music).
Explode (AGF, 2005) is a collaboration with spoken-word artist AGF.
The Four Quarters (Huume, 2005) is another foray into ambient
dub/glitch fusion in a cold, surgical atmosphere.
The First Quarter (15:29) indulges too long in rather tedious slow repetition,
and The Third Quarter (14:34) is a bit too confused and incoherent,
The Second Quarter (15:03) is instead a top achievement of his
chaotic bustling soundscapes, continuously reshaped by fragmented and subtle sounds.
The Fourth Quarter (16:00) is a slow-motion implementation of the same
concept, in search of catatonic hypnosis and repressed emotions, ending with
a six-minute coda of "whispered" tribal drumming and undulating droning.
The "glitches" of this musique concrete sound like ordinary noises of daily life, sometimes simply the noises that one can cause by walking in a dark basement full of junk.
Whistleblower (Huume, 2007)
lacked the meticulous production of Delay's best moments but it melted their
superhuman coldness into more emotional material.
If Whistleblower (9:44) and
Wanted to Kill (12:19) sound rather trivial collages of sounds,
I Saw A Polysexual (9:19) exhibits an almost narrative quality,
with tentative melodies and rhythms.
and the spastic dance of He Lived Deeply (12:54) mutates into an extraterrestrial transmission.
The sinister Recovery Idea (10:00) sounds like the soundtrack for a documentary on the secret life of carnivore plants.
Uusitalo's Tulenkantaja (2006) and Karhunainen (2007)
did to techno what Luomo had done to house.
Vladislav Delay's limited-edition double-LP Tummaa (Leaf, 2009) documents a collaboration with Lucio Capece on clarinet and saxophone, and Scottish soundtrack composer and arranger Craig Armstrong on keyboards.
It marked a curious detour into acoustic music.
Luomo released
The Present Lover (2003),
Paper Tigers (2006) and
Convivial (2008).
Vladislav Delay, who was also the drummer in the Moritz Von Oswald Trio,
formed a quartet (on which he plays drums and percussions) with Mika Vainio (on electronics), Lucio Capece (bass clarinet and soprano sax) and Derek Shirley (double bass), documented on
Vladislav Delay Quartet (Honest Jons, 2011), notably the subliminal
12-minute Santa Teresa.
Vantaa (Raster-Norton, 2011) returned Delay to his icy brainy murky
dub-industrial soundpainting with pieces that sound like the stream of consciousness of a mathematician trying to prove a difficult theorem.
The bubbling wavering flow of Luotasi and the
swampy psychedelic dub of Henki are emblematic.
On the bright side, the
castrated industrial music of Lipite has a funereal quality, and
echoes of the African jungle are eroded by a hyperbass syrup in
The dancefloor-oriented pieces are less successful:
Vantaa is a rather dumb, if muscular, beat engine, and the
pounding breathless Lauma is just fine for sweating all night long
but not exactly groundbreaking.
Delay's
Kuopio (Raster-Norton, 2012), which came after half-baked albums, is an exercise in spoiled hypnosis.
The sophisticated architectures employ
elusive shifting loops and delicate bubbling mixtures of timbres, a combination
that destroys the hypnosis while it is building it.
From the hiccupping, stuttering dub of Vastaa
all the way to the relatively straightforward techno ecstasy of Hitto, that seems to mock Dead or Alive's You Spin Me Round,
the album is a parade of altered state of rhythmic exuberance.
The intricate pulses of Avanne (8:16) first become a frantic gallop and later almost a locomotive.
The relentless tribal drumming of Kellute turns into the closest thing to a techno dance while the obsessive percussive feast of Osottava stubbornly eludes fruition.
The highlights are perhaps the
cyclical android poem Hetkonen (9:40), a living creature that first seems to acquire a melodic quality and then slowly disintegrates, and
Marsila,
the most dizzying and orgiastic ballet,
where clapping, clicking, pounding drums as well as grating and scratching noises all come together.
Kulkee is his idea of what a pop ballad should sound like: repetitive, robotic, limping dub-like and psychedelically distorted.
This classy album of austere and virtuoso digital production was perhaps Delay's best effort since Entain.
Delay's new passion, the pitch-shift, permeates Visa (Ripatti, 2014).
The dense, visceral 23-minute Visaton is driven by pulsating organ drones
amid echoes of Terry Riley but halfway becomes a manic beat intersected by random brief bursts of dissonant organ and then implodes in a series of radioactive emissions.
Even better is the ten-minute Viaton: a dark shapeless revolving mass of noise, like a journey inside a black hole, ending with a helicopter-like noise pierced by a storm of carnivore birds.
And the ten-minute Vihollinen is a testament to how
disorienting this noisier, louder, faster kind of musique concrete can be.
While not even close to the painstaking precision of
Kuopio, this album marked a transition towards a more aggressive sound.
Untitled - Circa 2014 (2018) contains leftovers.
After a four-year-long silence, mostly spent in the Arctic wilderness,
Delay returned with
Rakka (Cosmo Rhythmatic, 2020), which accelerated the adoption of a new aggressive style.
The hysterical percussive Rakka is emblematic of the shift from psychology to violence, and the carpet bombing of Raataja is perhaps the best
implementation of that manifesto. However,
the destructive ebullience Rampa that may shock but doesn't build anything.
Rakkine is equally incoherent and inconclusive, and Raajat is
plain childish.
Alas, these brutal mayhems preserve nothing of the elegant subtlety of Delay's best works.
Delay also collaborated with Jamaican reggae drummer Sly Dunbar on
Nordub (2018) and 500-Push-Up (2020).
