Dreamtime for Sleepless Thinkers
4
By Scrypt (Original)
At the beginning of his career, Sasu Ripatti (a/k/a Vladislav Delay) was a trained percussionist who hated most techno. His very first tracks revealed two major differences from other artists of the time: a personal style that prophesied dubstep by a decade, and an approach to rhythm that erased the stiff barline of beat-oriented electronic music. People who can't tell the difference think there's no pulse whatsoever in Anime. But the pulse is periodic and mutable -- it changes in ways that people who crave repetition should learn to appreciate.
There's an affliction among post-techno listeners and it's called BDD. People with Beat Deprivation Disorder have trouble grasping meters other than 4/4, 6/8 and 12/8. Such people will dismiss early Delay as "soulless" as opposed to understated and subliminal, "empty" as opposed to minimal, "beatless" as opposed to rhythmically free. That isn't the audience you'd expect to enjoy Ligeti, Stockhausen or Ornette Coleman, and it's not ready for an album like Anima, either. The album doesn't float along unobtrusively like normal ambient music. Its rhythm changes and shifts constantly just under the surface, like the musculature of H.R. Giger's metamorphosing Alien. It isn't uplifting, either: it is dark and uncertain, suffused with paranoia and suspicion. I've gone to sleep listening to Multila, but it's a cold narcotic hibernation sleep -- perfect for people who hate sentimentality.
For people with BDD, Sasu Ripatti recorded inspired commercial house and microhouse under the name Lluomo: There, you'll find enough repetition to fuel a factory (as well as obsessively perfect production). For people who tire of that, he created Multila, Anima, and Entain. He revisited the style later with Demontrack(s).
As a person with a degree in music composition, I connected to Anima like no other album from its milieu: At last someone knew how to make laptop music and escape the tyranny of the barline. Along with Murcof's Cosmos and certain pieces by Aaron Funk, it remains the only post-dance electronic music smart enough to scratch that itch.
