Vladislav Delay
Anima

LA RECENSIONE

Rolling through the streets.

Bouncing, zigzagging, stumbling, and trampling.

Rolling through the streets.

Palmary protector of those who ran away from home, High Priest of the incorrigible idlers, guiding star for all the disheveled adventurers sailing aimlessly!

Little ball of the roulette! Teacher of life!

I rely on your philosophy, your rolling, now smooth now jerky, which carries with it all the meaning, the only possible one.

The prize at stake? Irrelevant. The number I will fall into? Insignificant.

The important thing is to roll. Roll through the streets listening to my thoughts.

Without shape, without direction, without evolution.

Elastic cobalt-blue chords from a suburban night club, a pool of languid and diffused melodies barely hinted at, and then passed, and repased, and again transcended by the intoxicating aroma of glitch spices.

These are my thoughts, this is the time for the only track of the record: the memory of my grandfather spiraling on the smoke spirals of a freshly lit cigar, the sinuous postures of the Pan American paced by the beats of a forlorn dub, the overwhelming gas bill vanishing suddenly in the sparkle of a stranger's gaze, something of a double-caramel trip-hop continuously chewed over by a multitude of concrete refinements.

Is there perhaps something of Basinski in this record? Maybe, but on closer inspection…

…The repetitive electronics, the glitch distortions of Delay do not unravel like a post-modern Requiem with the procession of tapes sent in loop that are born and die in an instant. In Delay the fragments hover, hide, and then return in a spasmodic need for mutual communication.

There is rather something of the arcane, the elusive gesture of the storm that tousles and makes the snowflakes dance. They seem similar, but each is different, and each fits and overlaps and dances the waltz or the twist with its brothers.

These are electronic shards that speak to each other in a jagged, cryptic, and intimate language: like the sprays from waves crashing on the rocks, like thoughts dancing in your head as you walk through the streets.

But are thoughts perhaps “Spirit”?

No!

I reject Descartes and his flawed “I think therefore I am”.

I reject with Valéry “The Medusa’s gaze of the verb to be”: I am not, I think.

And to truly be there, I hope the croupier that launched me today will finally make me land on a special slot, where whatever happens, I can feel for a while at peace: the one where my pupils sink into those of my cat.