No text about the Finn Sasu Ripatti can omit the reminder that, in a former life, he was once a jazz drummer. The information matters for VD5, even though Ripatti’s alias Vladislav Delay and his many other pseudonyms have, since the late 1990s, stood for glitch, dub techno and deconstructions of experimental electronic music that not infrequently spill over into noise terrorism. Fifteen years after the album Vladislav Delay Quartet comes VD5 by the Vladislav Delay Quintet, which, alongside Ripatti, consists of Derek Shirley on bass, Lucio Capece on saxophone, Maria Bertel on trombone and Max Loderbauer, the veteran of Berlin experimental electronics, on piano.
VD5 requires a broad interpretation of the term »jazz«. Fundamentally, it is a Vladislav Delay album by other means. The instrumentalists do not shine through accentuated solos; their contributions integrate themselves like sound samples into a musical flow of subterranean grumbling, in which glitchy interference and electroacoustic insertions prevent any idyll from emerging in the first place. At times this recalls the electric collage albums of Miles Davis from the 70s, and in that sense brings the arc back round to jazz after all.z.
Vd5
