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Exasperated exhalation, wide eyes and neck turning to the left. Unfailingly to the left.
Too many grimaces, too many boastful anecdotes, too many chrysalises posing as butterflies, too much barter disguised as noble intentions, too much waste of qualifying adjectives, too much serious flaunting of "I I I."
Am I a snob/alienated? Maybe. But I am not (yet) so stupid as to not know that I myself engage in many "too much" too often; especially when I am in a "good" mood and decide to extend the benefits of my presence to others who, like me, would do better to mind their own business.
Am I a snob/alienated? I tell myself that, if anything, I have attitudes that seem snob/alienated. But I am anything but. When I'm at the bar, alone, with my alcohol-induced personality disorder taking center stage and I see and hear and perceive all that fauna that grunts, shrieks, drools, writhes, contorts, obliterates... Well, after a while I react like this: "Exasperated exhalation, wide eyes and neck turning to the left. Unfailingly to the left."
Is it, then, a snob/alienated attitude? Not even. It's simply changing radio stations: if (God forbid!) I'm tuned to Virgin Radio it's not that Lifegate doesn't exist at the same moment just because I'm not listening to it right now. I just have to bother to change the radio station: that's all.
That "Exasperated exhalation, wide eyes and neck turning to the left. Unfailingly to the left" is a shrugging off of all that obscene indecency I see and hear and perceive everywhere, a tuning into other frequencies that bypass those that only broadcast typically human communication modes.
And how can you not think of Vladislav Delay then?
Of his narrative talent, his daring uninterrupted speculations, his tentacular trips saturated with events I raved extensively here. In that "Anima" which, for those who titillate their taste buds with electronics of fine quality, remains to this day a very exquisite dish.
A gargantuan one-hour single take where our man displays all his tricks as a consummate playwright to weave a pièce pregnant with fugitive appearances and protean scenarios. And it is precisely this, in my opinion, the most characteristic feature of his works: less hyperuranic than an Alva Noto and less titanically expressionist than a Basinski, Vladislav Delay has the gift of being able to tell stories based solely on the environmental details of makeshift urban cross-sections.
And if "Anima" narrates the daytime peregrinations of a modern-day Joycean Ulysses, the four long sketches of "Entain" - Delay's studio debut - speak of just as many Dubliners in frantic search of epiphanies after sunset has activated a certain sixth sense in them and purged the city streets that have now rid themselves of human loquial.
Yes, at last, tired of all that chatter, I rise from that table and, standing as a partial and momentary representative of all the snobs and all the alienated of the terrestrial globe, I lose myself in the deserted city tuning only to its sounds.
In "Kohde" (opener of the record) the exchanges between subdued dub pulsations and chirpy glitch dishevelments translate into sound language the quiet imminence of an alley where a handful of broken glass whispers its story to the damp portions of a crumbling wall.
Kandinsky comes to mind who, in order to provide some deontological justification for his abstract compositions, claimed that "all things have a precise sound". Well, Delay seems to do exactly the opposite: all sounds refer to precise and tangible agglomerations of objects and colors.
And if the unsteady, slightly sinister orbicular electronics of "Poiko" seem to paint the ballet of lights that flickering neon signs cast whimsically on a shop window, the simil-techno syncopations of "Notke" allude to the recesses of a suburb square repeatedly traversed by an entirely inscrutable rhythm that rigorously regulates the thickening or thinning of the shadows that awaken at that hour.
The walk through the grey haze concludes with "Ele", a soothing and refined ambient fade out that cradles the gaze until the moment separating the last nocturnal shudder from the ambiguous transparency of the nascent dawn.
Vladislav Delay's pieces speak the secret language of objects and colors and - if I really have to seek affiliations - I would say that some works of Machinefabriek or Steve Roden can be compared in this sense, but with a decisive difference: the imaginative talk of the other two is often punctuated by an abundant (albeit skillful) use of field recording. "Entain", however, is a record of pure electronics.
And with the day now born, I too, reluctantly, return to the sterile cries of ordinary communication carrying with me the sensation, indeed, the certainty that much more interesting and exquisite stories and flavors are told and cooked between the folds and beyond the offal that plague the everyday.
We're back to square one: is it a snob/alienated discourse? Perhaps it's just a matter of taste, for the rest, ungarettianamente speaking, "so di passato e d'avvenire quanto un uomo può saperne".
And for the present, it’s the same thing.
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