Keplar Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Uwe Zahn might have been active under his real name more recently, but his longtime Arovane project has always remained steady apace. That being said, there's also a great impetus to reissue his music going at the minute: Lilies is the ambient musician's fourth album, and was originally released in 2004 by City Centre Offices, a label run between Berlin and Manchester. Inspired by a trip to Japan, there is an unmistakable eco-ambient undercurrent to this album. Out of print for almost two decades, Kepler do the good work of reissuing it now: Lilies is exquisite, with its laboured rhythmatics and lush synthetic plucks providing a blueprint for generations of Western ambient (techno) artists to come.

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: 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.