VLADISLAV DELAY
Anima
(Huume)
By Erik Morse
With the re-release of Vladislav Delay’s 2001 electro-acoustic epic Anima, we are granted a peek back at the high-modernist experimentation of European electronics in the late ’90s and early ’00s – the boon of the so-called post-rock era. Finnish DJ and programmer Delay, a.k.a, Sasu Ripatti, once recorded for Achim Szepanski’s underground/post-rave label Mille Plateaux – a titular reference to French post-idealogues Deleuze and Guattari of Anti-Oedipus fame – and he fit easily alongside glitch/IDM labelmates Oval, Cristian Vogel and Thomas Koener and the seminal Clicks and Cuts Series.
While Anima, a 60-plus-minute track of organic synth minimalism, uses little of the computer-generated glitching that became Mille Plateaux’s trademark production, its voluminous and spare abstractions – in rhythms, instrumentation, and tonal palette – was indicative of the “prog” methodology then popular among post-rave artists.
As rave historian Simon Reynolds once described it, the world of underground electronica following the acid house explosion was not that much different than that of rock in the the early 1970s, when increasingly “intellectualized” musicians had to reconsider their goal in the wake of the Summer of Love. According to Ripatti the title of Anima reflects a psychological component to the music, “an inner feminine part of the male personality.” Questions about the veracity of this assertion aside, the dip into musical psychologisms evidences a post-’60s Jungian turn – a popular citation among progressive musicians.