Vladislav Delay - An electronic kaleidoscope

Hi Sasu, so this is your first interview for OndaRock. This month you can find on our site a substantial feature based on your career. First of all, right now you're living in Hailuoto, a small island in Finland. Why did you decide to move there from Berlin?

There are several reasons, one of them being that I was starting to miss home, nature, and the simplicity of Finnish life and people. Let's say that, in the end, I'd also become pretty fed up with Berlin, where I lived for seven years. I'd been tired of living there for a long time, but I really didn't know where to go.

Then, since our daughter was born, the fact that we needed to move became undeniable, and we started actively looking for a new place to relocate to.

While we were thinking about the perfect place to move to, and already had Finland in mind for it, we visited the island of Hailuoto during the summer and immediately felt it was the ideal place for our family. For us, the island is literally a little paradise. It's beautiful and wild, full of untouched nature, and at the same time well equipped with shops, nurseries, schools, a post office, and efficiently connected to the internet. It's also very close to the mainland (eight kilometers, to be precise), and there's an airport nearby you can fly from to Helsinki.

We spent a huge amount of time looking for a place for ourselves in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Italy, or Madeira. I wanted a place of my own, where I could build a home to use as a base for my constant travels, with a high quality of life for periods of rest. On top of that, I was looking for a place that would be a great source of inspiration for my work, which is fundamental in my life. In Berlin, that had become a problem. While living there, in fact, I couldn't focus or feel connected to myself or my work, because of the huge amount of useless stuff around me, which distracted me from my work.

The concept of essential is different for each of us, and everyone needs to find a space that works for them. Fortunately, after a lot of hard searching, it was fully worth it, and I found the perfect place for me.

When I started listening to your music I was a bit confused by your choice to use so many aliases. Why this decision?

The main reason is that I wanted to differentiate my musical styles, to give them a specific meaning. There are quite a few different genres and concepts in music that I'd like to pursue, and channeling them all into one name, or a couple of names, would seem pretty chaotic and inconsistent to me.

When it comes to my music, I don't really like mixing different ideas and styles together. Speaking of which, I really admire Frank Zappa, who was able to blend everything together within his music. He himself has been a huge inspiration to me, even though at the same time I wouldn't be able to do things any other way, or appreciate a similar approach within my own work.

So whether it's ambient, dark, noise (Delay), or something along the lines of club music (Uusitalo, Sistol), or vocal house (Luomo), or noise-jazz (Quartet), or pop (Agf/Delay), or anything else, for me it makes sense to keep the different areas separate, at least through the use of different names.

I also do this for the audience, since people are often not very open to listening to completely different genres. At least this way there are titles, names, whatever, that listeners can look up and follow, choosing the ones they prefer most. For instance, there are very few people who like both Delay's and Luomo's productions, and that's pretty telling.

Over these ten years of activity, your most important moniker is probably Vladislav Delay. And it's certainly the hardest to understand and to listen to. "Ele" was still an unripe fruit, albeit a very interesting one, "Mutila" a massive success. What do you remember of that period, and what did the release of "Mutila" represent, and still represent, for you?

Unfortunately that period was pretty dark and not very positive. Back then I had a serious drug problem and I was suffering a lot from it right around the time I was composing "Mutila". Luckily, music was always there challenging me, and that mattered more than anything else. Several years have passed and I don't tend to dwell on them much, nor do I want to. But at the same time, I tried to push myself as much as possible to get out of that whole mess and to find my own musical language and identity, to learn how to use the electronic gear and everything else, which was completely new to me, since I used to go back and forth between percussion and electronics.

In short, it was a transitional period, a period of lessons learned.

How did you feel about releasing "Anima"? I think it's really hard to place "Anima" within the 2000s. It's not house music, it's not glitch or IDM, but it's not trip-hop or ambient-dub either — it's somehow a synthesis of all these genres. And why did you choose to release "Anima" under the name Vladislav Delay and not Luomo, which is perhaps musically closer to it?

"Anima" was also composed during the period when I was losing myself, maybe even more so than "Mutila". It didn't particularly help that I was starting to have a name, gigs around the world, and so on. "Anima", though, for me was a Vladislav Delay album right from the start. The material made under Luomo has always been, and still is, based mainly on vocals.

The Vladislav Delay project, for me, isn't tied to any one specific genre, even though maybe "Mutila", and now "Vantaa", best represent what those sounds and that project mean to me. Beyond that, though, it's always been a project geared toward searching for new musicalities, new ways of making music, listening, challenging myself, and asking myself questions about music.

"Anima" was an album built on a strong conceptual idea. I had just bought my first computer, and with it I could sample anything. It took an entire film called "HurlyBurly", which also captures my current state of mind pretty well, to give birth to "Anima". I started playing over this film, which was almost completely devoid of sound, containing only dialogue. I then redid it seven or eight times over the whole length of the film, and that's how the album came about.

Around the same time you released several things under the names Luomo and Uusitalo. "Vocalcity" is, for me, perhaps the most sensual album ever. Some journalists describe your work as Luomo as microhouse — do you agree? And tell us how you experienced the success of "Tessio" (and the resulting interest from Bmg).

Microhouse or not, that's just one of the names journalists and labels have tried to use to sell their music. Fame and success, to me, are double-edged swords.

I've always loved pop music and in part I also love its success, when it's connected to the music itself. But very often when you become successful in music, your songs stop being the point, and when it's about the persona rather than the content, I don't feel like having anything to do with it anymore. After "Tessio" and "Vocalcity" I really struggled to find myself in exactly that situation. Part of me wanted, and still wants, to live off music, and back then with Bmg all of that seemed absolutely possible. But I didn't immediately realize what it would take, and, even more importantly, how incapable I'd be of dealing with everything that it would take.

What's more, coming from an underground, ultra hardcore school like Basic Channel and all those other labels, it was very hard for me to picture myself on album covers or generally within an aura of success, and I tried to steer clear of it as much as I could. Compared to today, with all these young producers, most of whom are eager to sell themselves, to find the right managers and business models to follow, it's like night and day. These kids show exactly what it takes to break through, and none of that has anything to do with me.

All in all, it was very interesting, and in some ways, a challenge. I definitely made a ton of mistakes, but now I can laugh about it without any trouble. It's fairly humbling to think about how all those controversies unrelated to the music touched my world and how they hardened me, forcing me to protect myself and avoid pretty much everything.

The main issue was that I wasn't satisfied with the record that made everything possible - it was exactly as you said about "Ele", a kind of promising start, or something like that. To me, Luomo has nothing to do with "Vocalcity", and I say that honestly after about ten years. The albums that came after "Vocalcity" got much closer to what I had in mind from the beginning as far as the project's sound goes. A lot of people don't accept that, and some still start their reviews, ten years on, by saying my new album doesn't sound like "Vocalcity". But as I've already said, that's fairly common when it comes to audiences, and I have to live with it - and obviously I already am.

Your aka Uusitalo sits somewhere between the experiments you do as Delay and the more pop-oriented work as Luomo. Do you agree, or do you see it completely differently?

I see it the same way. After the first album I made under the alias Luomo, I started liking the idea of writing something rhythmic, something "club"-oriented. But I didn't want to use vocals, and I wanted to create more experimental tracks. That happened naturally on its own within the Luomo and Delay projects.

Over the last ten years the direction of the Delay sound has changed. "Whistleblower" and, above all, "Tummaa" are works that feel deeply different from your early productions. Your approach here seems more oriented toward improvisation. Does "Vantaa" follow that same direction?

I don't think "Vantaa" really follows the direction I took on the other previous albums. "Tummaa", especially, was a new starting point for me, in the sense that I'd wanted for a while to make something acoustic and refine new sounds and styles, and, looking at the bigger picture, that album is really what allowed me to decide to start the Quartet project, so I could fully focus on jazz influences, acoustics, improvisation, playing with other musicians, and so on. And with Quartet already set up, I can now fully focus on a more electronic side through the Vladislav Delay project. So, in short, "Tummaa" enabled and introduced the Vladislav Delay Quartet. After all that I moved back toward a more electronic style with Vladislav Delay, and that, in my opinion, is quite evident on a record like "Vantaa". But, as I've already said, the Vladislav Delay project represents more than just one type of sound or a particular style. It's up to me to find the possible ways to express it.

Going back to the previous question, improvisation is one of the defining traits of jazz, of which I know you're a huge fan. You started out playing drums - do you feel that influence is coming back for you? Your debut as Quartet, "Tummaa", or collaborations like Moritz Von Oswald Trio would seem to suggest that.

Sure, I've always felt its influence strongly over all these years, but now with the Vladislav Delay Quartet and with the Moritz Von Oswald Trio I get to work with a set of instruments I can hit and play on the spot, without needing electronic components or a computer. I love it. It's also a great way to balance out very electronic or pop material. I'm also really happy to have started playing percussion again after so many years, to have "made peace" with it after radically stopping a long time ago, back when I was starting to feel frustrated by jazz and its practical limitations.

I imagined I'd become a jazz drummer, and then, one day, I realized how today's jazz is basically a joke, and how I'd gotten trapped in a total void, listening to and playing old albums. What gets played instead nowadays, in the real world, is a total horror, a jazz cocktail somewhere between the banal and some strange form of worship, none of which has anything to do with any kind of creativity. Jazz was, and pretty much still is, dead. It really hurt to realize that and to have to bury my childhood dream. I invested an incredible amount of time and effort learning percussion and studying the jazz style, and in the end it felt like it had all been pointless. Now, after so many years, I can look at it more positively, but I'm still trying to unlearn everything I learned so long ago.

What are the differences in approach to composing between Delay and Luomo? And which software do you prefer to use in your sessions?

I usually use basically the same gear I have in my studio for all my work. But I use the tools in very different ways for each individual project. I consider myself lucky to have been working for a long time and to have built up a small but well-suited set of equipment that I feel comfortable with. It's mostly a collection of hardware and analog devices. I use a small set of synthesizers and several microphones to record any sound, which I can then process afterward.

I'm growing more and more tired of the "electronic" sound and of the way it develops, from production to content. It's usually far too homogeneous and generic, mainly because by now everyone uses the same gear and tries to sound as much as possible like this or that artist. I'm afraid I'm part of the same crime myself, and I'm trying, first of all, to come to terms with that, and secondly, to change the phenomenon. The main problem is the handful of tools everyone is using, namely the ones provided by Ableton Live, which I think is the curse and the worst thing to have happened to music in a long time, but which at the same time is a blessing, since without it millions of kids wouldn't have been able to make music at all.

But being the cruel person that I am, I still hope those millions of kids can't make music quite so easily, but rather have to learn something, invest something in it, fight for it, want it badly. By now practically nobody makes real music anymore - it's like a fast-food service geared toward churning out "decent enough" music, with no commitment, no risk involved.

Over the last ten years you've played all over the world, in loads of shows. I saw you in Bologna, at the end of January 2010. And I was really surprised by how rude the Italian audience was, what with all the chattering and so on. What are the differences between audiences in various countries?

They're not always that rude in Italy. The main issue is that if you don't show up with a punk attitude and play something that makes people scream, you're not doing anything special, even if we're talking about experimental pieces or club stuff. Everything I see going around these days when it comes to moving people involves cheap tricks, noise-bombing and making enough of a racket to drive people wild. Basically, when it comes to gentler music, people within the electronic scene don't seem to go crazy for it. That tells us a lot about the world we live in and its relationship with music. People are frustrated, dazed, and constantly need to feel something extra.

Audiences can change a lot, and unpredictably. Italy was a happy island for me for a long time, but in recent years I've picked up on a certain sense of frustration and a need for something I couldn't and didn't want to express. I think it depends on the new generations, who have completely different needs compared to the previous one, which used to follow my shows. But maybe the next show in Italy will still have that magnificent aura, who knows. It's not something you can state for certain, just as you can't say that shows in France are always terrible (even though, for me, they usually are, for reasons I don't know). In Japan it always goes really well, that's the one thing I can say for sure.

Last question for you, Sasu. You've played a huge amount of music. Ten years on, can you tell us which aka has made you proudest and most satisfied with what you've done?

Vladislav Delay. Basically, that's me. Everything else is exercises, challenges, projects, experiments. Other stuff.

Thanks to Giulia Onorato and Danilo Cardillo

Ride the wave of great music

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Alberto Asquini, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition