Sonically seduced by the infinitely reverberating, rapturous depths of this record, I no longer care that Sasu Ripatti essentially mines the same creative space with every Vladislav Delay release. The fact remains that under this moniker he makes perpetually gorgeous, imperfectly fractured ambience, setting the mood for transformation and reflection on a quiet night alone.
Fans have come to expect, and hopefully understand, that this is what a Vladislav Delay album will always sound like. Unlike contemporary Stefan Betke, who pulled a colossal bait-and-switch that many of us sensitive souls still lick our wounds over, Ripatti has kept his bond even as he attempted to bring new ideas to life within the familiar territory of his abstract dubs. The same trick, however, failed to work with his far poppier Luomo project, having reached some kind of ideological limit or perceptual dead-end with last year's tragic and anticlimactic Paper Tigers. By contrast, Whistleblower is an evolving repetition, a gradually yet naturally escalating cycle of real pensive soul-searching music.
Save for the radio-static flecked "Lumi," this album continues the epic tradition that characterizes much of his discography, including 2001's stunning and uninterrupted Anima and 2005's The Four Quarters, many songs nearly reaching and even exceeding the 10 minute mark. As on these cited records, Ripatti takes full advantage of freeing himself of time constraints, exploring his sentient soundscapes in psychedelic fashion on the gloopy title track. Another such example, "Wanted To (Kill)" throbs with an unexpectedly tribal mystique, its percussive pulses alternating between the ritualistic and the funky, rippling through an intricately woven template of damaged sonic goods and soothing textures. "Stop Talking" steps up the chaos level with lo-fi samples aggressively splattered throughout, whipping up an atmospheric uncertainty of shock and awe at its peak that somehow becomes suppressed just long enough to make it to the next track. The disjointed downtempo jam "He Lived Deeply" is replete with discarded drum patterns circa mid-nineties Bristol, adding a slightly more stable rhythmic dimension to an otherwise amorphic work.
An achievement in this landmark 10th year of publicly consumable work from Vladislav Delay, Whistleblower plays out as if salvaged from the recorded remains of some abandoned space station's now-decrepit soundsystem. While that could be applied to any number of his releases, in this case the description fits better than ever, leaving me to wonder what else Ripatti is bound to find deep out there in the cosmos within.
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