Agf - Delay - The strange symptoms of a successful duo

On the occasion of the recent release of Symptoms, the new album by the Agf/Delay pair, thanks to the good offices of Meike Nolte, tireless PR for Ellen Allien's BPitch Control, I caught up with the Ripatti couple. For the occasion, Antye Greie, or Agf if you prefer, took on the role of chatty spokesperson for the duo (as we know, of the two, Delay is the more reserved one…).

A preliminary question for both of you: your artistic personalities are very strong and… quite a lot to handle, I'd say! How do you manage the flow of your individual creative inputs?

Thanks for the question! Let's say we manage… We work and travel a lot, both driven by the desire to create a unique sonic language; we watch a ton of films, Sasu reads a lot of books, and I read a lot online. It seems to me we do quite a lot, so something good has to come out of it!

“Symptoms” came out after a long gap since the previous album: was that a deliberate choice or the result of a natural process?

Other projects, other work, and different priorities, I'd say. I also gave birth to our daughter, we moved to Finland, but above all we needed time to figure out what we really wanted to collaborate on. Until one day we said to each other: hmm, maybe we should make another record together, and at that point all the madness kicked back into gear…

This new work really grabs the listener's attention, drawing them in with frequent shifts in the structure of the tracks: is this a possible new direction for your music?

With this project we set out to reach the peak of our potential as authors, composers and producers all at once, supporting each other at the highest level. And yet I don't think we've truly managed to explore the full extent of our potential, but we're getting there. We both felt strongly drawn to pop structure with an experimental edge: crossover is the hardest discipline, you know.

Synth-pop, trip-hop, dub, minimal techno… in which of these fields do you feel (or not feel at all) most at ease?

We take what comes, we're not really interested in one particular field.

What role does the computer play in your music? Is it part of the composition itself, or just an advanced tool?

There's a lot of both aspects: both Sasu and I come from an analogue background, him as a drummer and percussionist and me as a vocalist, but we're used to writing music with software, inside software. That's what we do, yes.

How did the collaboration between the two of you begin?

In 2000, at Popkomm in Cologne, I went up on stage to tell Vladislav Delay that I'd really loved his set; we stayed in touch and then, after a few years, we became a family. We'd already thought about collaborating before we started seeing each other, and then... well, it took a few years. Now we work together a lot.

“Symptoms” is your first release with Ellen Allien's BPitch Control: how did you get in touch with this label?

I toured with Ellen in South America in 2003 and we became friends and mutual admirers. Since then we've tried to collaborate, so I got involved in building BPitch's current website, and I produced Ellen's latest solo album, “Sool“, in 2008. Ellen kept asking us for material, so we offered her this album.

In this period of widespread crisis, do you have any suggestions for keeping the music world alive?

I think the music world is very much alive, it's just hard to notice, with all the crap that's out there everywhere...

Thank you, Agf/Delay, for the great music and all the exciting noise you keep making for us.

Thank you for listening!

Ride the wave of great music

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