Vladislav Delay ‘Anima 2008′ review
Published by Boomkat
Anima originally surfaced in 2001 as an hour-long, continuous-mix on the mighty Mille Plateaux. The album marked a step into a more live sounding, freer production style, divorced from the more overtly sequenced beat designs of prior works (and the house-influenced 4/4 workouts of his Luomo alter ego). Anima retained the strong, icy dub feel that had come to characterise the Vladislay Delay sound, but the context had changed. It might be too extreme to start using terms like ’soundscape’, but undoubtedly, Anima didn’t use rhythm in the same compartmentalised, structured way that had featured in prior recordings. A mix of atmospheric synthetic sounds and hard to place acousmatic sources intermingle fluently, resulting in one of Vladislav Delay’s defining recordings – if you’re not already familiar with this record, this special new edition on Huume Recordings is an ideal introduction, reissuing the original album and throwing in a new ten-minute mix that distils the essence of Anima into a more manageable entity. The spirit of the music remains the same, but this new piece is far more concise and clear, calling upon a greater density of sound than the spacious, gaseous original. Consequently, you might argue that it would have served the album better had it been sequenced at the front end of the album, rather than at the back, but as it stands this new version makes for a brilliant summary of the hour-long sound mass that preceded it. Brilliant stuff – Highly Recommended.