(October 2009) Well, I’m confounded. I don’t know what to make of this record. I’ve been a Delay fan almost since the start, in all of his guises (Luomo, Uusitalo, Conoco, Sistol, The Dolls, AGF/Delay, etc.) and this one is a totally different beast than anything else he’s done. Attempting to move away from the sound the Vladislav Delay brand has come to signify, Tummaa focuses more on acoustic sounds, abandoning the glacial space-landscapes of Mutilla, Anima and even Whistleblower. But is this a good thing?
I’m thinking no. For an artist so pseudonym-friendly, and with each of his various guises being a specific sound, to put this album out under the Delay guise is a left curve. Luomo is known for the prog-house stuff, The Dolls are a downtempo/jazzy trio, Uusitalo is more of an electro sound. The pieces on Tummaa bear no resemblance to what has come before, and for that reason I wish that Sasu Ripatti had either put this out under his own name or under a new alias, but not as Vladislav Delay. Which brings up a point I’d like to get into – how much responsibility does an artist have to keep making records that sound like previous records?
As a fan, the expectation usually is that an artist, when releasing a new album, will do something similar to what they’ve done before, maybe with some progression, maybe a little change, but not a wholesale rethink. When I think of Vladislav Delay records, I want long tracks like the material on Entain, or The Four Quarters. That’s what I expect. And while the Delay project has been moving into shorter forms (Demo(n)Tracks, Whistleblower), the sound was akin to what had come before. Now maybe Ripatti felt he had taken the project as far as it could go (Anima certainly seems like it, with its 60+ minute piece), and wanted to switch things up. But, I’ll say it again, the instrumentation and compositional left curves of Tummaa are so far away from what this project has been that it almost feels like a betrayal of some sort.
I’m not against change-ups, don’t get me wrong. When Orb dropped their dub sound on Pomme Fritz, I was right there with them. When Aphex moved into drill ‘n bass territory on Hangable Auto Bulb, I drank the kool aid. When Ripatti wanted to do house music, I went along with it – that first Luomo record is amazing (although subsequent albums have been illustrations of the Law of Diminishing Returns). The acoustic textures here (sampled from live drumming from Ripatti, clarinet and saxophone from Lucio Capece, and piano from Craig Armstrong) are far removed from the out-there dub landscapes from previous albums, and it feels wrong.
Now as an artist, I think there should be free reign to explore one’s muse, try new things, etc. I’m not against experimentation. So what I’ve been trying to deal with on this record is the question of whether or not I’d like this album more if it wasn’t credited to Vladislav Delay? And I go back and forth on this. When Radiohead put out Kid A, and the indie press fell over themselves praising its daring electronic textures and “avant-garde” songwriting, my reaction was a slightly bemused “so what?” A thousand records that sound like that come out every year on tiny electronic labels, but no one hears them and therefore Kid A is “innovative” because it is Radiohead. Radiohead was known for a sound, and they switched it up and now apparently they’re the best band ever or something. I’m not against the risks that they took in writing that record, but I was against it being called “new” because, for people paying attention, it clearly wasn’t. When an artist is taking the risk of failure its usually at least worth listening to, even when it fails (hello, Bjork’s Medulla).
So is this record a failure? Probably not, in the long run. While it is a total change in compositional techniques and sound sourcing, it kind of works some of the time (as on the title track). But Tummaa is merely adequate – not great, not terrible. It can be argued that an album that produces an indifferent reaction is a failure, at least on some level, and I can’t disagree, but I’m haunted by the question of whether or not I’d like this record better had it been put out under a different alias.
Tummaa is out now on Leaf. [Listen & Purchase]
