Where to Start with Vladislav Delay, Finland’s Shape-Shifting Ambient-Techno Auteur
Vladislav Delay’s triumphant new album Rakka, his first in six years, marks the Finnish electronic musician’s return from the wilderness. Well, technically, Delay (real name Sasu Ripatti) is still out there: In 2008, he moved from Berlin to the tiny Finnish island of Hailuoto, population 952, just south of the Arctic Circle. Until then, Ripatti had been a fixture of the European techno avant-garde, releasing a steady stream of records under a variety of aliases—along with Vladislav Delay, there were Luomo, Sistol, and Uusitalo.
For a decade, Ripatti’s influence towered over experimental electronic music. He remixed Massive Attack and Black Dice and had a stint playing percussion in the Moritz von Oswald Trio. Most recently, he contributed to Ryuichi Sakamoto, Alva Noto, and Bryce Dessner’s soundtrack to The Revenant, a touchstone of contemporary film music. But after 2014, Ripatti largely disengaged from public life. Instead of jetting off to clubs and festivals every weekend, he focused on spending time with his family—his wife, the experimental musician Antye Greie (aka AGF), and their teenage daughter—and hiking in the tundra. He continued to make music, but little emerged from his home studio until now.
Rakka marks a major shift in Ripatti’s work: Instead of drifting, gently psychedelic tones, it is marked by impenetrable waves of granular sound and blistering sheets of white noise, as daunting as sub-zero winds. In fact, he says, Rakka’s lacerating style is informed by the region’s punishing winter landscapes. “Having lived in remote areas with no noise or artificial pollution, and also having done extensive hiking in the hardcore tundra, my ability to enjoy brutal and extreme sonic content has grown exponentially,” he recently told XLR8R.
The timing is good for Ripatti’s return. This year is the 20th anniversary of three landmark albums in his discography: Vladislav Delay’s Entain and Multila and Luomo’s Vocalcity. Each one captures a different facet of his work, from lo-fi dub crackle to deep-house abandon. In a single year, he hit upon the core ideas that would carry him through the next decade and a half. Get to know these pivotal albums, and five other key releases from Ripatti’s career, below.
Vladislav Delay: Ele (1999)
Going by the electronic music of the late 20th century, future anthropologists may conclude that the turn of the millennium was exceptionally overcast. Murky forms like ambient, post-rock, and dub techno descended like thick fog over the experimental music scene. Even by those standards, Sasu Ripatti’s debut album as Vladislav Delay was extremely opaque: a veritable soup of garbled synths, distortion, and delay.
A former jazz drummer, Ripatti embarked upon his Vladislav Delay project with 1997’s The Kind of Blue EP, featuring two long tracks of muffled synth chords and stumbling rhythms (and sounding nothing at all like Miles Davis). Ele, recorded live in the studio and released on Australia’s short-lived Sigma Editions label, followed suit. Largely devoid of perceptible structure, its three long tracks (between 17 and 30 minutes apiece) sprawl aimlessly, with dampened synths throwing off grainy static. Vladislav Delay’s music has often been discussed in terms of the minimalism that was ubiquitous in turn-of-the-millennium electronica, but there’s nothing minimalist or outwardly digital about Ele. Instead it’s a thick, turbid sound, with an almost physical heft, like wet sand through a sieve.
Conoco: Kemikoski (1999)
The same year that Ripatti released his Vladislav Delay debut, he snuck out a 12" under another alias, Conoco, also on Sigma Editions. Like Ele, it collects three meandering tracks—eight, 13, and 21 minutes long, respectively—of crackling ambient dub, but the rhythm is more pronounced and churning here. This is probably Ripatti’s least-known record, perhaps because his real name doesn’t appear anywhere on the label; for years, copies sat in secondhand bins at bargain prices, and it still goes for cheap on Discogs. After this, he abandoned the Conoco alias, but Kemikoski makes for a fascinating one-off and a telling suggestion of what was to come in his career.
Vladislav Delay: Entain (2000)
Entain is where all the pieces of Ripatti’s music coalesced for the first time. To the uninitiated, the music of this 76-minute monolith (all six tracks flow in one unbroken stream) is so abstract as to seem almost incidental, as though he’d left the tape recorder running while a screen door banged against a rusty spring-reverb unit. There are few recognizable riffs, no melodies at all, and hardly any fixed, discernible notes. Instead, silvery streaks of tone flash like shoals of fish above floor-shaking bass pulses. Ambient dub had been widespread for over a decade by the early 2000s, but it had never sounded quite like this.
Vladislav Delay: Multila (2000)
In 1995, Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus, of the Berlin minimal-techno duo Basic Channel, launched a new label: Chain Reaction. Over the next few years, Chain Reaction artists like Porter Ricks and Vainqueur smeared the opalescent pulse of dub techno into progressively blurrier forms. Five years later, Vladislav Delay grabbed his own squeegee and came up with Multila, bridging the gap between his own style and Chain Reaction’s trademark sound. On the 22-minute “Huone,” a propulsive techno rhythm asserts its presence more forcefully than in any of his previous music, but the remainder of the record dissolves into an almost beatless swirl of coppery tones. Long out of print and previously CD-only, Multila is getting its first-ever vinyl release on March 20; two decades after its release, it remains the crowning achievement of Vladislav Delay’s early period. With Multila, Ripatti took an oft-imitated style and made it wholly and inimitably his own.
Luomo: Vocalcity (2000)
Until now, Sasu Ripatti’s work had been resolutely grayscale. That changed with 2000’s Vocalcity, released under a new alias, Luomo. Compiling three 12"s that appeared within a year, Vocalcity swapped Vladislav Delay’s brooding formlessness for crisp, high-stepping deep house. Certain hallmarks of Ripatti’s previous work carried over: The average track length was nearly 13 minutes, and both the squishy, elastic basslines and spray of silty textures were familiar from Vladislav Delay. But the beats shift the emphasis from dub techno’s supine idling to house music’s bounce, and the temperature rises significantly. For the first time, there are words in Ripatti’s music, sung by voices both male and female. They’re mostly just mantra-like refrains—“Nothing to do others can’t do” are the only lyrics to “Class”—though “Tessio,” the album’s climactic standout, boasts proper pop songwriting. (Ripatti would revisit that song on The Present Lover, his glossy 2003 album that failed to yield the pop-crossover career he was hoping for.) Even in the songs without singing, it feels like every nook and cranny of Vocalcity is filled with the sound of breathing; the whole thing positively shivers with anticipation. It’s sex on tape.
Vladislav Delay: Anima (2001)
Ripatti had always loved to paint on a big canvas, but he really went long on 2001’s Anima, a single, 62-minute track. On the surface, things hadn’t changed much since Entain; rubbery bass tones bounce erratically across watery synth chords, and the skittering percussive noises sound essentially random. If you were to train an AI to make ambient dub, it might sound something like this. But listen deeply, and it’s incredible how much mileage he gets out of a handful of minor triads and some rustling white noise. If you squint, you can see Ripatti’s past as a jazz drummer in the skittering accents of the percussion, and there are moments of real beauty in the ebb and flow of complementary synth tones. The following year, he’d release Naima, a 42-minute live performance assembled from Anima’s raw materials, and accompanied by AGF’s spoken-word poetry.
Vladislav Delay: Visa (2014)
In the ’00s, Ripatti’s projects continued in parallel, and he continued to play with rhythmic abstraction, muscular techno, and house grooves. But as the ’10s dawned, it was hard to escape the sense that he had already mapped this turf thoroughly. Then came 2011’s Vantaa, his first for Berlin’s resolutely minimalist Raster-Noton label, and it was as though a switch had flipped: The brooding tones were familiar from past Vladislav Delay records, but his micro loops and digital shimmer sounded reinvigorated. In 2014, he expanded upon this refashioned sound on Visa, smoothing choppy digital distortion and held tones into a burnished expanse of drone. The effect was a little bit like Oval’s 1995 glitch masterpiece Diskont 94, but infused with a sweeping, almost Romantic sensibility.
Ripatti: Ripatti 01-07 (2014)
The same year, an entirely new sound entered Ripatti’s work, his first true deviation in more than a decade: Chicago footwork. Credited simply to Ripatti and released on his eponymous label, the seven 12"s in this series set aside the brooding restrain of his ambient music and the sensual poise of his house. Instead, he threw himself into tumbling, double-time syncopations and kinetic vocal sampling reminiscent of artists like DJ Rashad and RP Boo. It’s clearly his own take on the style; his cut-up scraps of voice come cloaked in his habitual gloom, and on the set’s most energetic tracks, he pushed the tempo well past footwork’s upper limit, entering unexplored territory. Aggressive in a way that his work had never been, these singles seemed like a detour at the time. From today’s vantage point, though, they look like the trailhead for the new direction he would follow on the muscular Rakka.
Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
