Ghost in the Machine: Vladislav Delay’s ​’Multila’ – An Analysis by Orlando Edmonds

1

Finnish Producer, Sasu Ripatti, has released under a number of aliases, but it is as Vladislav Delay that you can find him at his most deconstructive. Multila ​(2000), ​his most important work, is a record largely devoid of references to conventional instrumentation or instrumentalists. Compiling the Huone and Ranta EPs (both on the Chain Reaction label), it consists of six ambient tracks and a 22­ minute techno composition, ‘Huone’. Noises, drones, crackles and distant ringing make up the majority of its content. In interviews, Ripatti suggests that the music he likes is “​organic​”— he isn’t interested in classification by genre.

However, if we do talk genre, ​Multila ​probably falls into that of sound design, though it is haunted by elements of techno, that grow up out of the fog. This conflict of categories and identification, and what, indeed, it means when we talk about ​Multila ​as ‘music’, is what makes the record stand out. In one respect, it is grandchild of Italian Futurist, Luigi Russolo’s vision of ‘the art of noise’—conventional instruments are thrown out and machines take their place. In another, it is a collection of ghosts, with people and dance music buried among its textures. Certainly, in either case, ​Multila ​doesn’t sound immediately like the products of men’s hands—there’s an underlying detachment. What, then, if art imitates life, as the saying goes, is the life that ​Multila, ​more populated by machines than people, observes?

All the way back to Plato and Aristotle, most have agreed that music, and, indeed, all art, represents, or imitates, nature. The word ​‘mimesis’ ​has often been used to describe this idea. As distinct from ‘diegesis’, in which the world is told of, or narrated, mimesis is the ability to ‘show’ or ‘enact’. It is the difference between, say, a poem and a play: where the poem tells of the event, the play literally acts out the details as an event in and of itself. In this vein, some music, rather than telling us about a thing literally through the lyrics, actually shows us things through its form—the sonic quality of the timbre, rhythm, key, structure, and so on. Therein, the musician’s context (the world around them, their concerns, ideas and beliefs) is ‘mimicked’ in the music—the music is ‘mimetic’: it represents nature. All art does this, and, to an extent, something shouldn’t really be described as being art, or ‘good’ art, if it doesn’t. It’s a rubbish record if you don’t experience the feelings and/or ideas it is trying to communicate. If you just pressed play and Matt Berninger (of The National) literally stated ‘we are alienated, middle­class, white guys who feel estranged from our current relationships and nostalgic for our past,’ it might be amusing, but it probably wouldn’t offer you the cognition and confrontation that the whole interrelationship of the notes, rhythms and lyrics would. In other words, it would lack feeling and you probably wouldn’t give a shit. Altogether, the sound of the music ​shows ​or ​enacts ​the experience of the musicians, and, subsequently, of their moment in time.

vladislav-delay_18895

Vladislav Delay’s music doesn’t really sound like trees, birds singing and glaciers forming.

Roughly speaking, when we think of the word ‘nature’ we probably think of two things: green fields, and how we all have particular behaviours in common, because that’s just ‘human nature’. In the way I’m using it, however, the word ‘nature’ doesn’t mean either of these things, as much as it means, simply, what’s around us and what we ​inter​­act with.

Multila ​is characterised by not sounding as though it were made by ‘instruments’ or ‘instrumentalists’. It is, rather, a collage of noise. In a letter to a friend and Futurist composer, in 1913, Luigi Russolo wrote of his theory of ‘the art of noises’. Russolo’s idea was that music changes to adapt to the details of its contemporary moment, and that in light of industrialisation and “the advent of machinery”, he observed how composers had started to incorporate “the shrilliest, strangest and most dissonant amalgams of sound”. However, in order to properly address this new quality of experience, in the “pounding atmosphere of great cities as well as in the formerly silent countryside”, he proposed that composers should start using machines themselves as instruments. “Pure sound”, he claims, is no longer able to “arouse any emotion”, for it ignores the depth and complexity of the new, mechanised world. This music would employ radical sounds to accurately reflect the true goings on of the moment. However, this did not simply mean creating music that sounded identical to the machines used to produce it, but inventing new rhythms and melodies that critique and comment on changes in society.


Multila ​is an album that sounds like machinery. The opening piece, ​‘Ranta’​, starts with a rocking arm of metal or a scratched record underwater. Everything happens through a haze, or through a space between radio stations, and the only constant is a single, pitched drone. There is a quality of an ultra­scan, where the heartbeat is on a monitor because it’s unusual, but still in regular time with itself. In ​‘Raamat’​, we go straight for something happening on a horizon that could be trains moving, or it could be windfarms. It’s closer to a sine wave than strings, or closer to feedback—but not feedback from what’s happening, rather, a live wire snapping back from elsewhere, or the flicker and clicks of the Stalker’s ​trolley​, heading into the zone in Tarkovsky’s classic 1979 ​film​. By the last minute, it’s all become the Apple waiting­wheel, spinning, and angle­grinders.

Any ‘organicism’, which, as I mentioned, Ripatti says he appreciates, would seem to be, in our case, an organicism of form, not content. The composition of the album’s sonic palette, as we have said, does not resemble traditional instrumentation, or ‘organic’ instruments, yet it is not, structurally speaking, mechanical or repetitive music. It is, more or less, driven by a freedom of texture and transition. Defining ​Multila​ is its ability to play host to straight rhythms, swung patterns, micro­moments of concretion and emphatic pulses, while still remaining autonomous and undirected. The lack of ‘humanity’, or ‘nature’, serves to lose the grid, system or direction.

Despite the confusion, however, there does seem to be moments of synchronicity. Even when everything appears to be falling apart, a logic forms out of the randomness, and a kind of union happens. It’s still only the union of the live wire that flicks back and forward as it sparks and recoils from tension, but in slow motion, so you can see it form a kind of symmetry of shape and movement. In both ​‘Huone’​and ​‘Karrha’​, there is a gesture toward drums and bass in their delicate and gradual assembly of rhythms and patterns, but the sounds themselves are far from it—they are more like the clattering together of the component parts that make up the drum machines and synths than the instruments themselves. It feels like a machine struggling in a human form, or vice versa. Through the drones, ringing and detritus, it’s like ​Iron Giant ​trying to reassemble itself, post­nuke. There’s a conflict between the mechanised and the organic, and it challenges, perhaps, the very distinction between the two.


Saturated with the sounds of industry and the urban, and where sentient life appears disembodied, hazy, or not at all, ​Multila ​is a record of ​ghosts in machines​. ‘Raamat’, ‘Karrha’ and ‘Huone’ demonstrate this idea best. ‘Huone’ is the centrepiece of the record as ‘electronic’ or ‘dance’ music, as it occupies many conventions of techno, while ‘Raamat’ and ‘Karrha’ both contain moments of congruent rhythms and patterns, though always brief and distant. In each case, however, the familiar elements figure more as memories of something than the things themselves. For example, in ‘Huone’, there is a voice, but it is merely a solitary, breathy syllable. There are moments where one can hear what might be cafe conversations, buses rattling through metallic downtowns, answering machine messages, and even just digits slotting through binary code. All this happens among a rolling, clicking spatter of pseudo­drum patterns, which for their constancy actually manage to feel eventually worthy of a more straightforward dj mix.

In ‘Raamat’, there’s a syncing feeling, but it’s uncertain. You can pick out the odd lighter, shaker, and hand­held percussion and there’s a groove gestured at enough that we’ll call it one, but it could just be someone hitting your forehead with a dark space. ‘Karrha’ is another Techno phantom; it has the feel of when you’re headphones are only half plugged in and you get the weird, burnt out version of a tune. In both, you can nod your head and imagine a pulse, tempo and patterns, but this only makes you aware, ultimately, of the lack of these things. It’s more the absence of consistent and tangible dance elements that is announced when they occasionally do appear, rather than the fact that they are, indeed, present. They’re lonely ghosts rather than the horror movie type—they keep back. The result is further consolidation of this idea of tension between the two poles of the mechanical and the organic. The difference, by now, is that, rather than thinking of them as simply coexisting, or the same, there is a sense in which the mechanised is more the haunted house of the organic’s ghosts. Rather than the two coexisting, the former contains, or subsumes, the latter’s fragments.

Some of you might be asking how ​Multila ​is really any different from a wealth of other records that more or less lack conventional instrumentation or forms. Surely there are loads of releases where the mechanised is king and the humble human just pushes the buttons? Not really. Here’s why:

Fundamentally, ​Multila ​is unique in that it really commits to not sounding like it was ‘made’. To take an example from another favorite, Logos’s incredible 2013 album, Cold Mission​, also brings us into contact with a distinct sense of our imbrication within mechanised technology and the respective dissolution of the human. It deconstructs the principle of grime music in that it does away with consistent rhythms, aggressively employing silence and space between sections, and in some cases losing percussion and bass entirely—perhaps the most fundamental features of any dance music. However, there is still an abiding sense in which it contains, more explicitly, its ancestors. On tracks like ‘​Alien Shapes​’ and ‘​Atlanta 96​’, there are still glimpses of an MC. On ​‘Seawolf’​, there are clear sections of focused percussion and bass, and they’re even very danceable(!). The album, as a whole, gestures toward rhythm and pulse through carefully selected drums and synths that act as punctuation. These imply a beat, rather than define it as one—there are no ‘​subject-­verb-­object​’ phrases, to continue the metaphor. ​Cold Mission​is the bare bones of a genre as it heads into an uncertain future, or the skeletons of tunes along with a few cryogenically frozen classics.

Multila​, distinctly, is an album of ghosts. It’s full of life, but it’s the life of broken bits and pieces, or of nuts, bolts and binary code. Taking another example, where Eno’s 1978 Ambient 1 (Music for Airports) ​alludes quite presently and directly to people or players (remember the gorgeous piano parts or the synth choir), ​Multila​ is instead the phantoms of people buried among machines, not the two side ­by ­side, or a cyborg crossbreed. The defining characteristic of Delay’s record is its ability to detach itself from people or instruments, whilst holding on enough to each to make its doing so even more apparent.

Multila ​is unique in the way it sonically maps a contemporary relationship between people and machines. Here, ‘dance music’ is a ghost in a soundscape. People are no longer really heard behind a ‘performance’, but instead are ghosts inside the ghosts of their own inventions, as even the drum machines and synths only make themselves known through a fog, if at all. Rather than people populating a world of machines, as we might traditionally imagine our situation as being, ​Multila ​is a world of machines that form and constitute, themselves, the relationships and existence of the people they contain. The album​ enacts how the delineation between the manmade and organic increasingly doesn’t exist. In our day and age, even the conventional ‘organic’ becomes digital or mechanised through the way we access it, be that through payment, transportation, or advertisement etc.

The end of the record approaches this fact with care and nuance. There’s no heckling cry of the conflict of man and machine, or machine and the earth. ​Multila ​is more a witnessing than a protest. It observes the alienation of people from one another, through and by the displacing nature of certain technologies, and of people’s estrangement from the source of the things we need to live.


The penultimate track, ​‘Pietola’​, seems to lament this fact, however. Things begin to feel like a series of attempts to move out from the grind and repetition of broken records, oil drills and conveyor belts, and into a faroff space, as yet unpopulated by people or machines. Still, the final track, ​‘Nesso’​, brings an unexpected feeling of possibility, though it’s less like a breath of fresh air than a loading bar that just jumped from 19 to 45%. By and large, ​Multila ​is a low­mids album. It’s distant and gloomy and there’s not even an oomph of sub to kick your head into gear. ‘Nesso’ leaves you, literally, with a nice ringing in your ears—though still, characteristically, under a sea of white noise and crackle—which somehow ends the record with a sense of things to come. The track is subdued, but it doesn’t just mope about in its attic. It floats on a horizon of elsewhere, still bound and constant, but somewhere else, somewhere with more light and less metallic sand and clouds. Saying that, it is still a ringing in your ears, and not even an obnoxious one you can just switch off. It’s held back, but, again, the restraint is important, it’s for this very reason that there’s no sense of a false happy ending, or a grand finale rounding it all off. This, in fact, is the success of the record as a whole: its refusal to resolve back into any kind of fetishized sense of ‘pure humanity’. There’s neither a kiss that brings the ghost back to life, as at the end of the ​Casper movie, nor a sense in which the answer is simply to return to the ​lute ​and ​tabor​. ​Multila is wary, but it is no luddite, and ‘Nesso’ captures this pose. It’s an in­between place ending.


Incidentally, as I was writing this article, I was told Sasu himself was in between things, currently moving away from music. I can’t say I know where to, nor that I especially lament his decision, because, obviously, we still have ​Multila​, and it will continue to be what it is. It’s like, the trash has been emptied, but it’s still in there somewhere—there’s still heat in the bulbs.

Share.

About Author

Orlando writes and makes music in London.

1 Comment

  1. Very interesting.

    I actually disagree with the assertion of music representing nature (the concrete world). I think the relationship between the two is more complex than this.

    Music, perhaps more than any other form of art, treads a long line between abstraction and reality – largely due to the intangibility of sound. Sound can only exist through time. This logic can also be applied to cinema, to a certain degree; but if a film is stopped, we can still view the frame. Visual art has a very concrete basis within our realities. Sound can not exist without motion – it cannot be held, touched, or examined in the way a picture, sculpture, or even a film can. It can only be repeated and understood as an imprint on our own minds. (Literature is a whole other deal, which for the sake of brevity I shan’t address).

    For this reason, I would make the case that music in fact has a greater impact on nature than nature has on music. That isn’t to say it’s one-way traffic, but an exponential feedback loop. Nature feeds the minds of composers, and the compositions feed back ever more into nature.

Leave A Reply