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Big City Dub, Microscopically Tiny
'Heinrich Deisl
Heinrich Deisl
On one side: endless expanse, glacial landscapes. On the other side: urbanity, club scenes. Right in the middle: a Finnish musician. How to refer to him: Luukas Onnekas, Luomo or, just for simplicity’s sake, Vladislav Delay? Never mind: names aren’t the point here. At most, they indicate confusion-sowing tactics that don’t conform to market standards. When the Helsinki- native Delay flips open his laptop, what his hard drive reveals are sound designs that initially seem diametrical. Only the key signatures have something in common: reduction, abstraction, transcoding. The persuasive distinctions of the different soundaesthetic personae have made the electronic autodidact and ex-drummer Onnekas/Luoma/Delay into a regular fixture in the much-sifted-through no-man’s-land at the nexus of electronica, dub and house. And that at age 24 with some “cuts+clicks” programming experience (www. force-tracks.net/theory/theo.php4?theory=49) that as recently as two years ago was still tending in the direction of an audacious on/off switching. The first 12” release came out on the Finnish label Huume. Releases on Chain Reaction, sigma editions and Max Ernst followed. Then, with Mille Plateaux (www.mille-plateaux.net/mp/index.html)/Force Inc. (www.force-inc.net/fim/index.html), Delay found his favorite label, and in Stefan Betke aka Pole (www.pole-music.com) a friend. (Particularly relevant here: the sampler series “Städtizism” on the ~scape label (www.scape-music.de/flash/index.html). Every-/No-Where Finland, that mythic landscape of lakes, has long been—even before the days of Säkhö and PanSonic—a frozen object of experimental sound projections for spatially cramped Central Europeans. Independent of this crowd and jazz-socialized, Delay went about shortcircuiting his beat complexes with dub-grounded space&echo-chambers. He set the reciprocal catharsis in molecular glitch-spheres, in meta-musical realms that allow for the “possibilities of an epidemic permutation of soundfiles” (Achim Szepanski; Mille Plateaux). These operate in a geographically unspecifyable organic-abstract space in which time has condensed.In Search of Which Beat How does one make beat-absence and beat-orientedness mutually compatible? The only common denominator among Vladislav Delay, Loumo and Uusitalo is the musician himself, who has created for each of his alter egos tonal universes that have not been transductively permeable up to now, or hardly so. The respective reference systems seemed too homogeneous and idiomatic. Neither Luomo’s minimalist, soulful house tracks nor Delay’s microscopically fractalized dubbeats show off with material that lacks historical references. When Luomo’s first release “Vocalcity” appeared, the producer was named Luukas Onnekas. The album, with its combination of “micro-house” and vocals, made it big time. As Delay, he followed it up in 2001 with the 60-minute epic “Anima” that probably defined most trenchantly the “split per sonalities” reflected in his music.
Selected Releases: as Vladislav Delay: Anima (Mille Plateaux), Entain (Mille Plateaux), Multila (Chain Reaction) / as Luomo: Vocalcity (Force Tracks) / as Uusitalo: Vaapa Muurari (FIM)
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