by Andy Kellman
Having satisfied dancefloors and runways once again with The Present Lover (his second Luomo album), Vladislav Delay retreats back to the outer edges of dub experimentalism with Demo(n) Tracks, an exercise in industrial-style formlessness assembled with sheets of noise, the odd discombobulated beat, and the carcasses of deceased dub-reggae producers. Note the title: this isn't the follow-up to The Present Lover as originally intended; Delay apparently lost tracks that were in a later stage of development and decided to release these early-stage works instead. If the motive behind this album was to give those opposed to the sleek sound of Luomo more than they bargained for, consider it a success. The disjointed streams of jarring clatter might as well be the steel wool that scrubs off any memory of the dancefloor material. It's better to take the album on a track-by-track basis, and not as a traditional listen-through album. If you choose the latter option, it does play out like a series of sketches that often incorporate similar sounds. And yet there's no axis to hold it all together as a unified whole; the beginning of the average track is signaled loudly prior to settling into its own form of barely tethered discomfort, but this aspect only makes the album seem haphazardly assembled. Rarely is there any respite. In &Onttola,& you can hear traces of &Body Speaking,& his 2002 A-side as Luomo, and ironically, it's one of the best tracks on the album, creating a relative state of ease -- even if it's far from bliss.