Keplar Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Vladislav Delay's 'Whistleblower' makes up a key part of his discography - we see it as no surprise that he has revisited the album 15 or so years later here, relicensing its new masters to Keplar. Far from being the Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning of ambient dub, the music is a soft impression of what one might imagine a whistleblower to be; cool, calm, cold and calculating, in the face of a white-hot world set in opposition to them. The seven tracks on the LP sound like the sonic surplus yield of an alchemist hard at work at their accursed altar, with all manner of plops, swoops, swells, bursts and sways pestled-and-mortared into an overall impressionistic mix.

Review: Finnish studio wonder Sasu Ripatti returns under his Vladislav Delay moniker, arguably both his most recognised and obscure, universally adored and specialist. Opening on the logically titled and wholly immersive 'Track 1', these tunes are as rich as they are steely, combining white noise, distortion, and the clanging of surface on surface with tangibly eerie, atmospheric melodies.

Wherever you join things, the immediate impact is going to be significant. 'Track 4', for example, takes the elements that made its preceding numbers so spin-tingling, and finally builds those into something that packs inescapable rhythm while refusing to drop a beat, the culmination of that which has come before, marking this as a kind of set, leaving us with just that hint of the reassuring warm up, rather than purely an ambient album.

Review: This is a fully remastered version of Vladislav Delays classic Entain album across four sides of vinyl courtesy of Kepler. Originally released on March 3, 2000 it is one of many greats from Sasu Ripatti's archive of sonic riches and was his game changing debut originally on Mille Plateaux. It is a real classic of the minimal electronics era with plenty of devilishly deep details and electro-acoustic dub fissures. The album found Delay get ever more abstract than he had before on his 'Multila' works for Chain Reaction, and fuller deep house sound of 'Vocalcity' as Luomo.