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: 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: German IDM and experimental electronic don Arovane, AKA Uwe Zahn, is a name well worth taking a deep dive into if you've not already. Rising to specialist prominence in the late-1980s as a result of him playing no small part in pushing the evolution of instrumental art-hip hop forward, by the mid-1990s he was recognised among the most innovative names in synthesised leftfield, occupying a place that's as commanding as it is peaceful, a futuristic sonic world that pulls us in closer with every drum and refrain.
Icol Distil is one of his earliest releases, but certainly makes it clear that by the time he got round to putting stuff out under the Arovane guise he was already incredibly accomplished. Ear worm broken beat beauty after ear worm broken beat beauty reside on the track list, so prepare to be fully immersed.

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.

Review: Keplar releases a vinyl reissue of 2001's Curve, the second album released by Frank Bretschneider on Mille Plateaux under his real name. Curve saw Bretschneider pick up on the underlying concept of 1999's Rand, but gave his explorations of the sonic and stylistic range of electronic music notably more space and time to unfold. Merging compositional minimalism with sonic complexity, the eight tracks display an affinity for the production techniques of dub music, which had already been a major reference point for Bretschneider's work before. Its subtle grooves, especially in the rhythmically charged pieces towards the end of the album, also nod at the dance music-inspired work of contemporaries such as SND or Vladislav Delay. Produced during a prolific time for Bretschneider, who had previously co-run the Rastermusic label and was at that time still active under his Komet moniker, he considers Curve to be a crucial album in his discography.

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.