Vladislav Delay - "Whistleblower"

Vladislav Delay - Lumi (Huume 2007)

Vladislav Delay - Whistleblower / Huume

Why hasn't this album been given more attention? In a week where I seemingly cannot get away from beats, Vladislav Delay pulls me in and says hey, maybe you need to lay off on beats per se and try on something a little differently. Look at electronic music not from the beat down but from the ambient sounds surrounding it. Worry about rhythms later. Deconstruct the traditions of house and dub and rebuild reconstruct them in your own image. This is what Finnish-born, Berlin-based Sasu Ripatti has been chiseling away at for a decade now on his own Huume Recordings. Whistleblower is merely the latest in a long line of better and better releases.

A genre that was originally birthed inadvertantly by The Orb in the early 90s has since been exploited most successfully by Ripatti, but ambient dub isn't his only trick. As he has made long-since clear, Vladislav Delay is only one in a handful of different monikers that amount to variations on a theme via techno, house and downtempo. Conoco, Luomo (arguably his most successful), Sistol and Uusitalo are all takes on the sounds that have driven him from his time learning jazz as a kid... But we're a long way from Philly Joe Jones. Closer instead to Pan Sonic or even Matmos in found-sound manipulations whistleblown into the chilled mix of keyboards that float through songs like the 12-minute "Wanted to (Kill)" or the uneasy Space Station Mir theme song "Lumi," Ripatti has been digging endlessly to find what else lies in among the sounds of his chosen style.

2005's The Four Quarters was a pretty good album to be used as a natural segue for what was to follow. Whistleblower is it, but the tension apparent not just in the easy-going-at-first-glance synthesizers but also in the percussion (and lack thereof) is an excellent example of Ripatti's current mindset. Luomo, Sistol and the rest just wouldn't have worked for his grander vision on this occasion. It had to be downtempo, and the expectations had to be fucked with.

What's resulted is arguably his best piece of work in the decade that he's been at it under the Delay name. The glory in using dub as a technique is that you can hide sounds and rhythms for ages and then suddenly let them reappear again as if they had been that prominent the whole time. You could listen to this album a dozen times (as I now have) and never hear the same thing twice. That's part of what makes Vladislav Delay so engaging, and mostly what makes his music so enduring.