Vladislav Delay Quartet

"There's absolute freedom here to do what you think is right," explains Vladislav Delay, referring to his home on Hailuoto, a speck of an island off Finland's northern coast, in the frigid Gulf of Bothnia.

"There's no scene to bother me," he adds, "or to remind me of the mostly negative aspects of the music business." Delay has always been a maverick artist. But after relocating to Hailuoto in 2008, what he calls 'absolute freedom' has become the de facto muse guiding his music.

On 2009's Tummaa, Delay cracked open ambient dub's hermetically sealed aesthetic and ushered in elements of jazz-fusion, free improv, and industrial noise. Tummaa is dark, restless, and challenging. It's also a stepping stone, one that leads directly to Vladislav Delay Quartet, the musician's most radical statement to date.

Though this absolute freedom is inextricably linked to the relative isolation of his Finnish home, Delay's latest record is very much a product of collective participation and multiple locales. In Derek Shirley, Lucio Capece, and Mika Vainio, Delay has found three musicians more than willing to translate such a nonnegotiable concept into sound.

A balance is reached between individuality and the demands of the unit. "This ensemble," says Shirley, "functions as four individual and strong voices meeting together in the middle."

Before dropping needle to wax, it's tempting to frame VDQ as an extension of the Moritz von Oswald Trio, which Delay also participates in. After all, each one is an electro-acoustic ensemble led by one of ambient dub's most prominent architects. But as Delay is quick to point out, "MVOT is Moritz's thing. I bring my sounds and percussion into what he has in mind. With Quartet, it is much more what I like and want to create."