Vladislav Delay :: Whistleblower [2022 Remaster] (Keplar/KeplarRev)

Whatever the age or the day, Whistleblower is a masterpiece that will keep revealing itself as it remains evergreen through the ages. Like weather patterns or shifting coastlines, its shapes never quite settle, and that restless, living quality ensures that every return uncovers some new flicker in the mist.

Sounds smear, hover, and recombine

 

Sasu Rippatti, the man behind Vladislav Delay and numerous other musical identities, thinks he makes jazz when in fact he’s making worlds. Having started Vladislav Delay without having heard techno or much electronic music, his approach emerged from an almost accidental collision with the tools of the genre rather than from its traditions. Perhaps being from the far north of Finland adds to this extreme outsider perspective, where isolation becomes a kind of laboratory and listening becomes a form of weather watching. His music is many things but in this guise it’s clouds of swirling, synchronized, atemporal and repeating elements that sound like nothing human made, only the results of collisions of disparate sounds.

It’s as if several tape machines collided and melted together to form a single amorphous unit of sound moving across a shifting landscape. Rather than building tracks in the conventional sense, Rippatti seems to release processes into motion and observe where they drift. Sounds smear, hover, and recombine as if subject to their own gravity. Rhythm appears and dissolves, texture thickens and thins, and time itself feels suspended somewhere between pulse and atmosphere (case in point: “I Saw a Polysexual” and “He Lived Deeply.”) The listener is less a participant in a composition than a witness to a slowly evolving ecosystem of sound.

2007’s Whistleblower (originally available on Huume) was a collection of tracks that arrive unannounced, linger like lost spirits, then fade and shimmer away. The title track opens the album with a gauzy meditation where there are very few sharp edges, though plenty of bits and bobs pop out at the listener like fragments catching light through fog. “Wanted to (Kill)” follows, forming a more solid rhythmic bed with minimal, scratching drums that seem to drag themselves forward rather than march. Even here, the rhythm feels provisional, as if it might evaporate at any moment.

The music sounds as if butterflies or insects were allowed into the studio to program the machines, leaving us with a sound that’s both vague and shifting while also being very insistent and right in the listener’s face. Small sonic details flicker in and out of perception: a scrape, a pulse, a spectral chord that briefly blooms before dissolving again into the surrounding haze. The effect is strangely intimate, like overhearing a mechanical dream.

Allowing space, patience, and unpredictability ::

Rippatti is a master and was so at the time of its making, as is evident in the mere fact that he’s created compelling tracks without showing an overtly forceful creative hand at the helm. There’s no sense of domination over the material; instead, it feels like careful cultivation—”Lumi” a prime example. He allows space, patience, and unpredictability to shape the outcome. The result is music that breathes in long, patient cycles rather than quick gestures.

It’s a collection not of songs but of memories, hypnagogic fragments of a day’s recollection in the mind of someone drifting in and out of sleep. Each piece seems to pick up where another left off, though not linearly—more like recollections surfacing out of order. Listening becomes a kind of half-conscious wandering through corridors of texture and rhythm that feel both alien and strangely familiar.

With this vinyl remaster—cut by Kassian Troyer—on Keplar‘s KeplarRev series (February 2023), Rippatti has included remastered versions of the album tracks, and not in a hackneyed updated style but rather in a way that reaffirms the album’s breathtaking planes through unreleased recordings of the original source material. These versions feel less like remixes than alternate vantage points, revealing the architecture beneath the fog while preserving the mystery that made the original recordings so absorbing.

Whatever the age or the day, Whistleblower is a masterpiece that will keep revealing itself as it remains evergreen through the ages. Like weather patterns or shifting coastlines, its shapes never quite settle, and that restless, living quality ensures that every return uncovers some new flicker in the mist.

Whistleblower [2022 Remaster] is available on KeplarRev. [Bandcamp]