Music is sometimes a strange object to leave in the
hands of experimentalists. Vladislav Delay, the Helsinki
born musician, is definitely one not to be trusted to
produce straightforward records. Following his releases
of last year, under his own name, on Chain Reaction
(Multila) and Mille Plateaux (Entain)
or under his Uusitalo or Luomo guises, Delay comes back
with a disconcerting, yet amazingly defiant and beautiful
album.
Evolving in similar fields as fellow countrymen Pan
Sonic, Delay’s approach to music and sound processing
is very often disturbing to the non-initiated. Anima,
his fifth album in less than a year, is by all means
an intriguing project. Consisting of just one track,
over an hour long, this record is an organic piece of
constantly mutating music, following the ebbs and flows
of generated sounds, with only the end result in mind.
During the first part of the track, the atmosphere is
pretty subdued. But, after nearly forty minutes, there
is a sudden transformation, when a clearer rhythmic
pattern appears for a moment, before vanishing again,
into an even more tranquil slumber land. The might of
Anima however is that, despite moving very
slowly, Delay manages to avoid repeating himself, playing
with voice samples and sound sources, and periodically
breaks his patiently assembled structure to rebuild
it again. The originality of the work largely compensates
for the lack of variety.
Delay offers with Anima a radical experiment
into music behaviour, unveils every aspect of a consistently
changing landscape, and concentrates on microscopic
details to reveal the big picture.
4/5 |
