Vladislav Delay Quintet Announces New Record vd5

Sasu Ripatti has released new music as Vladislav Delay under a group name for the first time. The album, titled vd5, is credited to the Vladislav Delay Quintet and arrives after years of solo work, one-off monikers, and a deliberate retreat from urban electronic scenes.

Ripatti trained as a percussionist from age five, moving through classical, jazz, and death metal before switching to electronic production in the mid-1990s. That rhythmic grounding has always informed his off-kilter programming, from the deep house of Luomo’s Vocalcity to the abstract spaces of Multila and Whistleblower.

The quintet format is not a sudden break. His 2009 album Tummaa already featured live instrumentalists—Lucio Capece on bass clarinet and soprano sax, Craig Armstrong on piano—and was recorded after Ripatti relocated with his partner to a remote island in the Baltic Sea. vd5 suggests that direction has kept developing, with the group setting now formalized.

No tracklist or release date has been shared. The announcement alone, though, reframes Ripatti’s ongoing project as one where electronic production and physical performance sit closer together. For an artist who has long treated rhythm as architecture, the shift from solo studio work to a named quintet reads less like a side project and more like a return to first principles.