Vladislav Delay - An electronic kaleidoscope

Sasu Ripatti comes from the North, from a city of about one hundred and thirty thousand inhabitants, Oulu. We're in northern Finland, five hundred kilometres from the capital, a stone's throw from the Gulf of Bothnia. It's cold, very cold. The winters are long and harsh, the summers dry and mild. Sasu was born in 1976, Jean-Michael Jarre released “Oxygene”, and in a sense everything starts from there too. What makes this blond Finn - who spent seven years transplanted to Berlin and now lives in a quiet little house in Hailuoto - so special among the multitude of electronic artists of the last fifteen years? What do names like Vladislav Delay, Luomo or Sistol - his monikers - now represent in electronic music? What makes Sasu such an elusive and yet so “total” an icon for understanding what music meant in the 2000s? The answer, quite simply, is soon told. Across his aliases, the man from the North declines every possible variation there is. He shapes sounds that are now alien, now terribly earthbound. The common denominator? Agility - the ability to move with frightening skill through the folds of sound. Knowing how to shape it, turn it inside out, adapt it to a state of mind, to a perpetual motion. One of the key figures of the 2000s talks to us, and lives alongside us.

Form and substance – Vladislav Delay

Vladislav Delay is probably Sasu's most famous alias, and certainly his most prolific. With nine albums under his belt, Delay explores a musical universe made up of understated ambient, hazy electronics, abrasive dub and field recordings from every angle. But let's take it in order…

The year 1999, the debut: Ele. A still fairly unripe work, but one that already makes clear the sonic fabric from which Delay operates. Three tracks for a dry hour of mid-air fluctuations, impalpable, faint and utterly uncoordinated dub. “Pisa” moves abrasively with an almost frantic gait, “Khode” opens with an ambient breath and lays down its mechanical dub veil, while the title track turns out to be perhaps the weakest of the three, drifting in a somewhat inconclusive gaseous state.

From here on, though, it will be a continuous ascent.

Less than a year goes by and the - big - leap has already been made. That leap goes by the name of Mutila, and its port of call is Maurizio's Chain Reaction. Seven tracks, almost an hour and twenty minutes of ambient-dub. Delay delivers, in one fell swoop, one of his masterpieces, perhaps the true peak of his entire career. It opens with “Ranta”, a dark ambient sketch through which veins of grey blood flow. In the sinister seething of the first track you can glimpse the darkest lines of a sedated Fluxion or the most cerebral Monolake.

The dub flow of “Raamat”, moving in ways not far removed from Pan American, and the buoyant ambient of “Viite” would stun any mind: comings and goings and simmering, watery effervescence and chronic impalpability. But it is in the mantra of “Houne” that Delay truly defines his creed, his aesthetic: twenty-two minutes that start with a muffled beat, an almost gentle touch that gradually reveals itself in a spastic rhythm opening up into glitch and a dub-techno with a futurist aftertaste, all of it immersed in an enveloping liquid. And while the initial isolationism of “Karha” brings to mind the legendary 1994 compilation, before veering off into numbing sketches, the following “Pietola” breathes in the acrid scent of autumn, of crumbling earth and broken radio frequencies.

Mutila marks the distance from the more ambient, understated Delay, pushing him into a dimension not far removed from his very first shows of force under the Luomo name. And it hands us a masterpiece of visionary power, in a play of light and shadow sketching out landscapes that smell of ice. Only at the start, but the material is already destined for the history books.

A few months later Delay is back on the attack, this time on the legendary Mille Plateaux. The label is at its peak and signs him: thus Entain is born. Entain is a profoundly different record from Mutila. Gone is that punchy, muffled beat; it returns instead to the path of the debut. It's no coincidence that “Khode” and “Ele” are nothing but a remake of the tracks from Ele. The water-level dub of “Khode” photographs the silence of a marsh steeped in a humidity that slowly thins out, while the glitches of “Poiko” break up the mild ambient that unfolds without interruption.

The revisited “Ele” shines with its own light, laying its melody over honeyed textures and water games, while “Notke” is once again the ambient-dub you'd expect, and which duly surprises: a sunny start, a pale sun standing out against a sunset of greyish clouds painted in washed-out yellow tones. Once again, working with rather different coordinates, Delay hits another bullseye. The one flaw of the album - if any - is perhaps simply that it arrived after Mutila. Otherwise, it's a fantastic record because it shows the ambient side of its predecessor. It reverses its course, and retraces it backwards. A mirror has never been so faithful.

After two masterpieces, needless to say, a third follows. On Anima a new Delay emerges, one perhaps much closer to the sexy melodies released under the Luomo name. What exactly Anima is is hard to say. It's not strictly an ambient work, not properly dub, not a house record, nor idm or glitch. It is all of this and its opposite. The fascinating formula of its single track - an hour long - plays on an entirely new plane. Combine the most lysergic Future Sound Of London, the Basic Channel-style ambient-dub, the post-rock escapes of Labradford and then Pan American, the soulful house released as Luomo, or the sweetest trip-hop, and you get Anima.

More than an album, an experience. An hour of liquid loops, a modernity turned sensual and alluring, a sugar that slowly melts beneath a muffled, pastel-tinted sun. There's no rhythm to speak of, only the usual understated, abrasive beats: it's house music without rhythm and without a backbone, music to dance to lying in bed, moving your limbs with the same slowness as the sound waves rolling by. Anima wraps around the ear, seduces it and never lets go. In fact, it repeats the same game an infinite number of times, with an undeniable appeal, even wearying in its unchanging sameness, without variation on the theme. Scattered, candied glitches hold up its faint non-structure, fading house inserts make it catchy, while the halting, slapdash dub acts as its counterweight. There's no pause in this journey painted in rose tones; it's a singular work that proceeds whispering in your ear just how much music, in being delicate and frail, almost sickly, can enchant and bewitch.

Following Naima, the live rendition of Anima performed at the Ars Electronica in Paris, Delay decided to take a break from the moniker that was, at the time, less well known. The works released under the Luomo name had in fact met with far greater success, complete with interest from major labels such as Bmg. By now, though, his fame was firmly established, and the trilogy mentioned above bears witness to the undeniable visibility achieved by the Finnish wunderkind.

Three years go by before Demo(n) Tracks arrives. In the meantime, partly due to friction with Bmg over contractual sticking points that prevented him from distributing his work in various countries, Ripatti decides to found — or rather, more precisely, to revive — a label all his own: Huume.

The new record immediately stands out for one aspect: the brevity of the compositions. Gone are the endless, glitched-out ambient-dub suites, replaced by brief vignettes averaging three minutes each, in which Delay's taste for deconstructed, spastic ambient merges with a warmth previously felt only on Anima. The effect is thus rather disorienting, because while the amorphous dub remains — indeed becomes even more of a load-bearing structure — what changes are the substrata, the backdrops, which turn colorful. The faint hues of these shades shift continuously, yet always stay within a warm, welcoming horizon. There are no more spectral refractions, no cold Nordic brine. Here there's only room for a "Kasvot Uivat" that reassures you, for the disorienting effect of the sustained dub of "Kotilainen", for the retro-futurism of "Demonit" or "Kaikki Hyvin". Overall, the easy-listening effect is heightened, even if it comes at the cost of cohesion and uniformity.

Demo(n) Tracks is thus a more than respectable record, but one that doesn't live on the same flashes of brilliance as its older sibling, Anima.

It would be unfair to call The Four Quarters a minor work, if only because it concentrates the insights of "Anima", its warmness and intrinsic warmth, into structures — there are four tracks averaging around fifteen minutes each — closer to a mini-suite dimension.

With The Four Quarters, perhaps for the first time, Vladislav Delay edges toward a jazz-experimentalism that would only find its full consecration four years later with Tummaa. You can sense its first shoots in the sonic tides of "The First Quarter", with a sound far less oriented toward ambient-dub and perhaps even more fluid.

The importance of Vocalcity — think of "Tessio" — is evident in the lukewarm impalpability of "The Second Quarter", in which you can already sense the impro veins that are then developed with more conviction on the third and fourth episodes. The most isolationist Loscil peeks through on "The Third Quarters", while the closing fifteen minutes speak the language that would later be translated by the second installment credited to Moritz Von Oswald Trio. Delay creates his strangest, and perhaps most transitional, work. The fact that it's still a great listen says it all about the man's greatness.

Three years pass and Delay (re)proposes himself with Whistleblower, an oddball flow of synth lines that scatter in a continuous stream into what could be described as a confused swarm of dub pulsations. The record is made entirely using the famous technique of digital processing, a sort of dynamic patchwork immersed in its slow becoming within a universe of micro-sounds running in reverse current. The real madness is that within all this virulent sonic abstraction, you can sense, in every single passage, an enchanting sensitivity to the laptop.

Dissonances clash with drums stretched over frayed skins, as happens in the opening pairing "Whisleblower/ Wanted To (Kill)", atonal swarms that intersect with cosmic debris ("Stop Talking"), or electrocardiogram-like tracks trying to follow that groove that exists only in the (daydreams) of good old Sasu ("Lumi").

The first six minutes of "He Live Deeply" are the only moment where there's any real contact with reality, before avant-garde ingenuity (re)takes over, both because the rhythm section maintains a steady undercurrent, and because the synth flourishes don't follow impalpable paths. Diving into the unstable magma of "Recovery Idea" could be one of the most unusual experiences for any die-hard fan of the genre.

Tummaa sounds different from any project Vladislav Delay had ever released before. There's less silicon and more experimentation across the album's seven tracks. The piano and rhodes of Armstrong, and the saxophones and clarinets of Argentine musician Lucio Capece — the other musician involved in the album's recording sessions — are treated with an almost industrial attitude, while Ripatti, for his part, manipulates a drum set as if it were an avant-jazz orchestra from which to extract every kind of sound. References to the world of techno are naturally present, and in general the improvisations are stretched over long loops (often played on piano) that help create an enchanting atmosphere.

Right from the opening track, "Melankolia", Vladislav Delay marks out the new boundaries of his explorations: the space is pristine, and scattered background noises create a void for an anguished piano line, accompanied by sporadic bursts of silicon. The arctic melancholy of Scandinavian landscapes emerges in the intro of the following "Kuula", before a clarinet transforms the dirge into a whirl of trans-Siberian flavors. On "Toive", Ripatti's love for the shamanic trance of electric Miles Davis emerges, thanks to a groove that builds until it explodes into a bubble of red-hot silicon.

Vantaa, that is, Vladislav Delay act ten. Sasu opens up everything: head and heart. It immerses you completely, holding your head underwater until you realize you can breathe without needing oxygen. Sasu returns, in a sense, to the origins of his trademark sound, but without the coldness that once defined it. The influence inherited from Whistleblower is felt, and it's the avant- tightrope acts that pay the price. It seems Delay wanted to recover a far more physical contact with sound, a contact that speaks of ambient and subtle dub, in a liquid movement that touches everything and wets nothing.

"Luotasi" opens the dance: ambient comings and goings with irregular dub, the usual chronic impalpability, with mists that never stop swaying, while "Henki" grows more physical in structure, with a backbone that revolves around a subdued, floating dub.

Delay builds visual frames with astonishing naturalness, processing the grain of sound, smoothing it out and returning it pure. Listen to the landscapes of "Lipite" — perhaps the track where the influences of Tummaa are felt most — or the watery play of "Narri" to discover the magma of oceanic volcanoes. The synth traces faint, muted lines that ripple into a swarm of broken trajectories ("Vantaa"), before reaching the cacophonous ecstasy of "Lauma", a triumph — unlike anything else in his career — of sustained beat over grayish, looping backdrops.

It's left to the sensual dub-techno of "Levite" to restore the candor, with the splendid closing of "Kaivue" sealing it all.

There wouldn't be much need for words to describe a totality made of sound, only the urge to lie down and stay like that: submerged without being short of breath. Nothing will ever have seemed so quiet and limpid to you.

A year later, Kuopio has structure, its bones are rock-solid. With the same fantastic enveloping trails. But these aren't panels and drapes left to float free – as in the last two works – so much as functional elements dressing these vertebral columns, these finely-worked supports. God has come back down to earth, and shows the world how beautiful things are made.

A sound of impressive softness lives and rises, travels, dominates, illuminates. Sasu has never let go this much, with that sun that lights us up now in his command. It's a process of melting ice that's as gentle and constant as it is energetic and explosive.

Stalactites light up and shimmer as they distill drops of water one by one. The spurts and the clip-clops grow ever more insistent. "Osottava" opens like an Alva Noto dusted in sugar, and resolves into a looping trickle arriving from some other galaxy: a sinister, almost horror-tinged (witch) mantra of cosmic beauty.

The distilled warmth of "Kulkee", the telegraphic back-and-forth with a pressing beat lurking underneath on "Marsila", gummy candies dipped in glitch for "Hitto". All of this to say how Delay's universe has become pure structure, captured in its most liquid essence. The aggressive stance of "Vastaa" is something rarely, if ever, heard from Delay before: roars. If "Hektonen" vaguely recalls the masterpiece "Huone", the snow-buried dub of "Avanne" or the spasms of "Kellute" trace a thread that ties everything together. Perhaps here Delay has completed both his most pop work and his absolute peak. An expression of an art forever balanced between load-bearing columns and discarded trails, "Kuopio" elevates the concept of fusion to its summit. There's no cloud on the horizon, no storm coming. The Northern Lights, the sky above Kuopio, live by a light that never goes out.

And it gives off a warmth that's perhaps a little distant. Kuopio is the soundtrack to an immaculate space. All you have to do is listen in silence. The light will come to you.

In 2014 came Visa, the first LP on his own Ripatti label. Delay seems to let his immersion in his homeland do the talking. There's almost no room for any kind of beat, and where ripples do emerge they're disjointed, isolated, bouncing around in nonsensical motions that define icy textures and backdrops. Delay speaks off the cuff, in a faint voice, with that sensation of lukewarm ice evaporating. With the mammoth "Visaton" working on an ambient sound stripped bare by atmospheric agents, playing a game of dub-subtraction compared to the "Huone" that broke so many hearts. Sasu no longer cleans up the sounds, no longer purifies the field recordings. On the contrary, "Visa" shows the dirty snow piled at the edge of the sidewalk, left to its own devices, waiting to melt. Like the wise, it no longer claims to build, to renew itself, to aspire to anything. It simply goes along with what it lives every day, looking out from his studio. The fir trees, the bare, sparse grass, the deer, the first white autumn flakes settling on the permafrost.

Next up are "Viaton" and "Viisari", the former woven from impro-electronic textures, the latter a sweet urban nocturne. And then "Vihollinen" with its echoes of the Hyperdub sound, teeming with voices muffled by distance, or the splendid off-beat sketch of "Viimeinen". All of this is Delay now: a purist of form who lets his eyes and ears do the talking, not handling the sound but leaving it free to shape itself.

And so, in this motion of self-erasure and bowing to whatever presents itself before him, Delay further demolishes himself, his art. Awaiting a new season. Or a new, icy architecture.

In 2020 came the surprise return with Rakka. In between there were five or six years of near-total silence, a retreat into something close to monastic life. Which meant: no social media, no shows, no records, no interviews. Nothing at all. A noisy silence that, through sheer repetition, could have even suggested a tombstone for the Delay project. And yet he was always there, in his little house skirting the edges of the Arctic. Always with Agf, always fishing for trout or salmon, recording sounds. In short, the whole range of things you can do up there, in Hailuoto.

What's left of all this? Everything, and yet nothing. There is Nature, yes. But this isn't a field recordings album aimed at photographing it. Quite the opposite: it's taken as inspiration and pretext, to tell its story in a different way. Not as a horizon governing everything from above, a wise and immanent force. If anything, as a driving force, perpetually in motion. A factory, a subterranean pulse generating other dimensions. It's not a complicated record, nor a particularly treacherous one — quite the contrary. The barriers to entry are nonexistent, the impact is immediate. And devastating. We're nowhere near the usual placid Delay. The one who, whenever he made room for a beat, shaped it into something pulsing, muffled and reassuring. We're not even remotely close to that fencing-foil Delay, who carved out microhouse with Japanese precision. Nor are we in that Arctic that exudes calm and peace, long silences and immaculate horizon lines. "Rakka" is an immersion into a crack. With sounds – as in the best Technoanimal or Pan Sonic – bursting out from every direction, jagged, broken, angular. Blasts of digital noise that are incredibly warm, slashing even harder than Yellow Swans. With dub echoes, and splashes of pure industrial. In short: an infection, a virus spreading noisily.

The harpoon strikes come from every direction, in a black-metal drift (by Delay's own standards) that leaves you open-mouthed (and itching to smash whatever gets in your way). There's "Rakkine", which spreads – in its dense techno – like a raging storm, there's "Rajaat", a snapshot of a glacier exploding in on itself. And then more: the pandemonium of "Rataaja", "Rasite" which bends the chaotic mood, brushing up against the filthiest, most lunar Boards Of Canada. If you can imagine a hell that knows its own Arctic side, well: here it is.

This foundry – with ice tearing the machinery apart – is the most physical and extreme thing Vladislav Delay has ever produced. It wedges itself into your ears with an impressive shockwave. You come out with broken bones, beaten bloody by these razor-slashes soaring madly. There's no room for hesitation, no room for holding back. From this Apocalypse, this icebreaker, run if you want, while there's still time: what's beneath your feet is cracking. For everyone else: hold on tight, the ship will be rocking for a long while yet.

Rakka II (2021) is no less intense and takes us beyond the borders of sound, beyond the great North that is Sasu Ripatti's homeland, through piercing pulsations and glacial infernos. It's not easy to recall musicians who have dared to push electronic music into such extreme territory, but certainly its layering can bring to mind one of the masterpieces of Tim Hecker, "Ravedeath, 1972", an innovative and hyper-layered album, but infinitely less aggressive than the two "Rakka" records.

Vladislav Delay keeps pummeling the listener with sounds that seem made of real matter, where noise and ambient embrace each other only to cancel each other out and be reborn in new horizons. In these chaotic sounds lies nature in its truest violent and wild essence, viewed with no romantic banality whatsoever but in its authentic substance, an eternal and unstoppable driving force that sweeps away everything in its path.

"Rakkn" is thus a manifesto of digital chaos, yet utterly ordered in its stunning tectonic jolts. The pulsations turn compulsive on "Ranno", with sounds that grow ever lower and more anguished, while on tracks like "Raaa" or "Raato", the hammering beats are wrapped in far higher-pitched sounds that act as scaffolding. The only different moment is "Rakas", this time close to an ambient music overflowing with anguish, akin to the worlds of Labradford and their side project Pan American. It's interesting to note that nothing in this track gives any sense of stasis; rather - even in its slowness - everything points to a perpetual, unavoidable flow.

The two "Rakka" releases can lay claim to being among the most authentic soundtracks to nature, in its most brutal and realistic substance, that electronic music has ever been able to imagine.

The warm embrace of the North - Luomo

Confirming an eclecticism all his own, Luomo embodies Ripatti's strangest guise. This is where good old Sasu merges his two main souls. The creative element dictated by the mind and the rhythmic impulse suggested by the heart finally live within a single sonic body. Halfway between the bionic detonations of Delay and the bombs dropped with Sistol and Uusitalo, the path taken under the Luomo moniker shows different approaches to groove, in turn chased by constant electric zigzags and soft micro-house layering. The untameable Finn thus challenges his own skill and dynamism at the controls, weaving his personal electronic web made of hisses and voltaic shards, magnetic flickers and muffled bass, never giving up on straight-line pulsations into vibrant, restless clubs, the kind favoured by the Black dance-music dominators of Chicago. Luomo thus outlines Ripatti's definitive creature. While Vocalcity, the debut under this alias, repeatedly represents his flash of genius, his most blinding trail.

Produced in the early months of the new millennium, the first work credited to Luomo is a succession of red-hot beats mixed with deep-house vocal crescendos. Rhythm's centrality dominates the entire structure, framed by all manner of laptop detours and pulsating TB lines. "Market" alone clearly points to new directions worth following. Straight-kick rhythmic constructs, surrounded by micro-swarms of electronics, slot into what would become the luminous chessboard of the likes of Jonson, Tate and Dhula. Ripatti opts for few tracks. True mental excursions into the universe of the best clubs on the old continent characterise the album, at times a sort of DJ set elaborated in the studio (take, for example, the unreachable thematic mutation in "Class").

The ultimate expression of this exciting fusion lies in the twelve minutes of the famous "Tessio", in which he strings together a whole series of rhythmic restarts well disguised by a blinding groove and the amniotic fluidity of the keyboard, before a soul chorus exclaims in a controlled voice "Baby it's ok, we'll make it better, baby, I, I'll survive, without these women in my life".

The record receives no small amount of praise from critics, without ever straying far from a limited, well-selected audience. "Tessio" itself earns huge acclaim among insiders, to the point of being included as the closing track on the excellent "Hypercity" selection curated by his highness Andrew Weatherall, remixed for the occasion by the illustrious Mathias Schaffhäuser.

Two years of astonishing experience in the dancefloor universe follow, which suddenly project the icy Ripatti towards a decidedly unexpected downtempo model. The Present Lover is thus yet another mutation within the mutation, the elegant metamorphosis of Luomo's trademark groove. The opening "Visitor" is precisely the calling card of this new and intriguing blend of intentions. This time, femininity is the central pivot from which he can then freely flutter outward. Woman is the centre of the sound.

Ripatti thus embraces brand-new lounge structures, the obliqueness of nuances giving way to a chic, sensual imagery. The beat's backbone is lightened by a romantic effusion of rhythm. Sasu reveals himself as lover and seducer, at once victim and executioner of the feminine universe. And so it becomes a succession of warm variations on a theme. The title track itself highlights Ripatti's new state of mind in the guise of the modern concubine. In "Body Speaking", body language thus has L(')uomo chasing intangible, inner rhythmic orgasms. It's the record's erotic-sonic apotheosis, the clean break from the debut's synthetic lines. The reprise of "Tessio", reshaped to follow the new downtempo attractions, fully highlights the need to follow instinct and temporarily set aside any form of avant-garde provocation. The result is, in its own way, unsettling and exciting.

Although made more accessible overall, The Present Lover remains one of the Finnish producer's most candid moments, revealing in certain ways his most human and playful side. After mixing four tracks with his friend Domenico Ferrari on the negligible but honest remix album The Kick, Ripatti returns to his "Luomo" guise on the enigmatic Paper Tigers.

Having set aside the soft appeal of a certain aperitivo house, the record presents itself as a possible variation on the jagged excursions undertaken with his partner Antye Greie-Fuchs in the side project Agf/Delay. The substantial difference lies entirely in the greater accessibility of the groove and of the electric vocalisations inserted with elegant mastery and less unpredictability. Nonetheless, the record offers several flat passages, well concealed by an excellent alternation with decidedly more inspired episodes, such as the Björk-esque "The Tease Is Over" or the bouncing "Good To Be With".

Despite a string of exhausting collaborations and the most varied live commitments picked up here and there across the Old Continent, with Paper Tigers the tireless Sasu tries in some way to settle his creature, blending the electronic dynamism of his beginnings with the luxurious composure displayed on his second effort, only half succeeding in the arduous task of disguising the first, evident (and obvious) symptoms of fatigue.

Convivial comes out two years after "Paper Tigers", and in some ways forms its ideal follow-up. The album presents itself as a carnival of sounds, packed with illustrious guests: from Catherine "Cassy" Britton, who opens the dance with the dry electro-soul rendition of "Have You Ever", to the charismatic Apparat, perfectly at ease on the ballad poised between Radiohead and Telefon Tel Aviv that is "Love You All"; from the resurgent Robert Owens, tackling his usual elegant, blues-tinged house ("Robert's Reason"), to a surprising Jake Shears on leave from Scissor Sisters, for whom Luomo has cooked up an electronic funk worthy of peak Prince.

As many as four of the nine tracks on the tracklist feature the voice of trusted collaborator Johanna Iivanainen. It's on these tracks that Ripatti more freely shows the experimental side of his music, building twisted grooves and rhythmic carpets inlaid with a thousand colours. Freed from the cumbersome presence of the guests on the first part of the record, Luomo takes over the stage and lands two of the most seductive tracks on the whole work, "Slow Dying Places" and "Sleep Tonight", proving once again that if there were only one name to spend to represent techno of the last ten years, it would be that of Sasu Ripatti.

Three years on from Convivial comes Plus. Sexy house, beats almost always pastel-toned, never any rashness or harshness, but touches of very well-groomed music. Those trails - his trademark - from Anima resurface here, amid monotonal variations and a deeply sensual undertone of skin against skin. "Twist" embodies its most soulful side, "Good Stuff" - an absolute masterpiece in his discography - its most visceral: a looped, hypnotic structure, few phrases, and the house music of bodies touching and brushing against one another. And dancing. The kind of melodies that make you want to move, to feel every single muscle, every single fibre of your body coordinate itself into one single, continuous whole.

“How You Look” in a soft-techy progression, between juggling textures and a few scattered sweet glitches, “Make My Day”, perhaps the real damp squib of this Plus. The robotic “Happy Song” breaks the false sweetness of the previous track, favoring the usual play of shadows propped up by a very linear beat. “Medley Through” is pure old-school Motown charm, somewhere between yellowed photographs and generous helpings of the Chicago school. And if up to this point there hasn't been that much electronic music in the strict sense, “Form In Void” once again reverses course toward a sound that looks to a very skeletal synth revival (think of the latest Ford & Lopatin in minimal mode, and hence Junior Boys). The closing “Spy” and “Immaculate Motive” add nothing significant to a record that doesn't invent anything.

But it's precisely in this normality that Ripatti shows off his skills as an undisputed master of the contemporary electronic scene. A sound that's always alive and visceral, moving slowly in rivulets that shift color at their own pace. There's no way to be disappointed by the man from the North; despite his supposed coldness, you'd only want to hear him say “Put your hands around me. Totally”.

A Frozen Interlude – Uusitalo

By 2000 the name Vladislav Delay was already circulating among devotees of the new techno. Helping build the cult around the Finnish musician was also the first Uusitalo album: Vapaa Muurari came wrapped in a white sleeve. Just like the snow and ice that the fourteen tracks on the tracklist evoke: “frozen” techno that worms its way between your synapses thanks to recognizable geometries and pop-ambient hooks.

After six years, and after the success of the house records released as Luomo and the more experimental ones released as Vladislav Delay, in 2006 Ripatti went back to releasing a record under the Uusitalo name, Tulenkantaja. The atmospheres of the ten tracks on the tracklist remain tied to the silent techno that the Finn helped define with his records. A desolate music trapped in rigid structures of silicon.

The following year, in 2007, came Karahunainen, the best Uusitalo record released to date. The less rigid, more varied style makes room for contamination with the dub sounds dear to Vladislav Delay: the result is an incredible album that, while retaining the usual arctic references of his previous works, displays a range of astonishing basslines capable of erupting like geysers amid the ice.

Breakbeat Sensuality – AGF/Delay

Agf has been Sasu Ripatti's wife since 2005, and the mother of his daughter since 2006. Focusing her research once again on a different field. And elevating it. This Explode shines with a light all of its own, an elusive black pearl born from the collaboration between the bewitching Agf and minimal-techno alchemist Vladislav Delay. Complex music for sensitive souls, dry, at times abrasive sounds, violent breakbeats and erotic vocals that slot faintly into intricate electronic weaves.

It's precisely Agf's interpretation that acts as harmonic glue, making fluid a sound that would otherwise risk running aground due to its overly pronounced rhythmic fragmentation; everything works, though, and works perfectly.

So what is this record? Too abstract and stripped-down in texture to really be trip-hop, Explode seems instead to draw on the influential Laika/Moonshake experience, in its obsessive repetition of beats, in its reprise of hypnotic noises like radioactive shards of post-kraut-minimalism.

The music of Explode evokes landscapes steeped in urban anguish, solitary minds wandering catatonic through the darkness, among decaying alleyways, sirens echoing in the distance, muffled screams, a sort of “Strange Days” with an unwritten ending. It's representation before it is aural delight, visions that semiotically feed on the residue of the industrial age, regurgitated in the guise of anthropological testimony to a civilization in collapse.

The record opens with “Do Protest”, a spiral of vacuum-sealed sensuality, before moving on to the obsessive pulse of “Explode Baby”, a sort of Can numbed by intense neon lights. “All Lies On Us” is too moving to be described, just one warning: listen to it with emotional detachment, or your heart might bleed. A faint Eno-esque drift runs through the grooves of “A Distant View”, a postmodern ode performed in an inn at the end of the world, the uncontaminated sound of a cyberpunk minstrel trapped in the entropy of the senses. There's no overarching melodic line, only sketches that materialize out of nowhere, then suddenly dissolve. Telling examples of this are the murky “Restrict”, built on apathetic percussive iterations, and “Slow Living”, track number ten for the record, a limping Martian soul music.

A minimal semblance of a narrative returns with “Distributor”, a psychedelic swoon haunted by memories of Bowery Electric, before closing the game with the Fennesz-like romantic drones of “From Morning On”. Dark, voluptuous, alien, almost a masterpiece.

Four years pass, 2009: Symptoms. Synth-pop, trip-hop, dub-techno. The sheer number of reference points is impressive only up to a point; what really stands out is the mastery with which these elements are fused together, reaching an admirable level of overall cohesion. Where Explode largely gave rise to a bare, icy sound, the situation on Symptoms evolves, at least partially. No longer, or not only, dry rhythm sections, krauty blends updated for the new millennium, frozen electronic magic arriving from the North Pole. The new direction heads toward decidedly warmer territory, between minimalism, sonic repetition and enveloping, noisy electronics, at times seduced by the dancefloor.

The opening “Get Lost”, which sounds like it could have come off any Massive Attack record, breaks free from the duo's productions to project us into a sonic world very close to trip-hop at its best, balanced on the edge of dub. The astral blasts adorning the melody of “Connection” seem to arrive straight from the Land of the Rising Sun. It's impossible to keep your composure listening to the icy rhythmic rumble of “Downtown Snow”; the ghosts of the most acidic down-beat emerge amid sinister futuristic omens and imaginative melodic unravelings (“Outbreak”). “Generic” brings back minimal-techno syncopation, setting up “Most Beautiful”, which evokes that hazy electronic pop of which Air are masters.

Opiate repetitions poison an atmosphere that's already anything but reassuring (the gorgeous grainy voice on "Bulletproof", moments of glacial stasis in "Second Life"), inspiring digital drifts shaped like a wandering tale (the long, hypnotic "Congo Hearts"). While acid synth moments won't disappoint synth-pop lovers (the title track and "Smileway"), the closing "In Cycles" manages to marry Fennesz to a thoroughly Nordic taste in crafting regular but thoroughly compelling grooves.

Urban unease and a pessimistic portrayal of a world that isn't too far off.

Minimal obsessions and techno guts – Sistol

Following the more muscular side of his music, Ripatti debuts, almost at the very start of his career, with the Sistol project in 1999. The self-titled album is deeply influenced by minimal-techno, a genre that was exploding as a mass phenomenon on dancefloors worldwide at the time. Granite-solid and even repetitive, the album sketches out essential landscapes and rhythmic structures of skeletal efficiency, leaving very little room for melody. Streaked with glitch veins (the rarefied closer "Kotka"), without any major jolts, "Sistol" settles into a solid average level of well-established, enjoyable techno routine.

After more than ten years in which the moniker is set aside, Delay returns in 2010 with On The Bright Side, and the difference from its predecessor is obvious. Leaving minimal influences behind, the record goes straight for the jugular with an effectiveness that's at times devastating. Dry, full-bodied rhythms: Vladislav is clearly having fun, and you can feel it when the melodies intertwine and show off in a contagious, obsessive back-and-forth. There's a deep passion running through this tormented, epic, focused and effective music. Even though he's hardly a sweat-and-four-to-the-floor kind of animal, his versatility in putting together such a positive club-oriented record is yet another confirmation of what a well-rounded musician he is. Tracks polished to a shine, already primed to become dancefloor anthems ("(Permission To) Avalanche", "Hospital Husband"), alternate with blinding electro flashes (the delicate synth textures of the title track, the dark glimmers of the restless "Fucked-Up Novelty") and moments where the push on the rhythmic drive doesn't feel out of place at all (the lashes of "Contaminate Her" and "A Better Shore").

Beyond the individual tracks, On The Bright Side showcases an inspired, lively Delay, capable of experimenting and delivering music that's red-hot yet reflective at the same time, gradually letting every facet of his character as a man and an artist come through.

As a coda to this release, two essential 12-inches would follow shortly after, in which artists of the calibre of Redshape, Jori Hulkkonen and Scuba would draw inspiration to shuffle the deck and remix a few tracks, with results that are certainly worth a listen.

That same year, Sistol's resurrection is completed with the release of the double CD Remasters & Remakes, where the first disc reissues the debut, adding two tracks from the original recording sessions ("Hojatus" and "Kojo"), while on the second disc top names like John Tejada and Alva Noto take turns reshaping, in their own way, a work that was already very good to begin with.

Regardless of any future developments, Sistol will remain the vessel through which the artist channels all his frustrations into music that is tormented and drenched in sweat.

A triptych of clashing souls – The Dolls

A three-way work made with the help of Agf and composer Craig Armstrong, the self-titled debut of The Dolls is, to date, Delay's only collaboration with his wife outside of the Agf/Delay project. As the near-constant presence of the German composer's voice makes clear, the album is a delightful concentrate of the vocal experimentation so dear to Agf, influenced as much by Armstrong's pianistic classicism as by the Finn's rhythmic digressions. The central theme is the exploration of every possible avenue of interaction between three souls, trying to make them coexist in something vivid and intense. Several solutions nod back to Agf's solo career, as she brands the album with her trademark understated delivery, true sound-poet that she has shown herself to be since her very first albums.

The perfection with which the piano notes are interwoven with experiments halfway between a sickly trip-hop and shamanic spoken-word-music makes the album unique in all three musicians' careers.

Noir, crepuscular and decadent atmospheres descend from the very start, blending chiaroscuro torments (the dirge "Martini Never Dies", the improv gusts of "Soul Skin"), more pulsating passages (the moving crescendo of "White Dove", the stinging beats of "Choices" and "Night Active") and an almost unusual airiness (the lovely pop showmanship of tracks like "Collect The Blue" and "Kukkuu"). The similarities with Agf/Delay's lean structures can be felt in the sparer episodes ("Motor City" and "Favourite Chord" rest on an effective rhythmic pattern), though never entirely free of a hint of urban rarefaction or serenity. Where the classic improv roots take over ("Star Like", the title track), the register shifts toward a jumbled pile-up of melodies, gusts and drum lattices masterfully played by Delay, who proves himself a solid performer, as shown live in the concerts he played as a duo with Agf across 2005 and 2006.

Still without a notable follow-up, The Dolls remains an isolated yet hugely significant episode in Delay's career, yet another side project with a decidedly positive outcome, in which the artist lands the winning blow, managing to coexist with two formidable artistic personalities.

Impro time – Vladislav Delay Quartet

What, then, lies beneath this project? Essentially, the urge to let the music run free. Debut was born and developed out of sessions dominated by a single verb: improvise. Perhaps more suited to a live performance than to being captured on a physical format, the album digs tunnels that Delay had never touched before. Setting aside the evanescence, (partly) the dub, the limping ambient backdrops, here we travel along coordinates that touch the hearts of those who love the claustrophobia of Pan Sonic, reworked in the flavor of an impro-jazz quartet. It's a long, inexorable litany, one that walks hand in hand with the latest Æthenor, a litany in which tolling bells, spectral sounds, and the lightest dub incursions chase each other. A stretched-out noise, never overly biting, adds the final touch.

"Hohtokivi" spins on itself, frail and sinister, "Minus Degrees, Bare Feet, Tickles" retraces the stylistic hallmarks of the latest Fenn O'Berg, "Santa Teresa" is an obsession for clarinet and stretched-out dub, "Des Abends" travels over a sea of broken glass. It's the thrilling free-jazz of "Killing The Water Bed" that bares its claws, though, an orgy of interweaving lines and furious spasms, along with the frontline dub of "Louhos", which crosses Capece's tight ranks with Vainio's trails.

The intelligentsia settles in and plays. To be pedantic, one could say the opening section tends to stay on tracks that feel a bit predictable. In the end, though, tallying it all up, there's really only one thing to say: they win.

Architecture with a variable weave – Moritz Von Oswald Trio

To be truly ungenerous about it, one could call this a project born along lines not unlike those a jazz trio would follow. Yet it so happens that a project originally conceived not for the studio but for the stage has, within a couple of years, produced two of the most compelling works in a limbo where jazz, electronic music, ambient, dub and techno all meet. A few years ago, following a stroke suffered mid-flight, Moritz Von Oswald lost the use of his right hand, and it's that hand's velvety touch which the enlightened minds of Delay and Loderbauer, in a sense, try to restore.

When an artist sows for fifteen years, it's only fitting that, sooner or later, the moment comes to reap the fruits of that hard work. That moment has arrived for Moritz von Oswald, and, I assure you, getting your hands dirty has never felt so good. A towering figure, one of those whose name alone is enough to make industry experts blush, he decides to step onto the field and play hardball. Vertical Ascent is the fruit of numerous live sessions held over recent years around the world, shows in which the Basic Channel patriarch proved to everyone that he is the father of dub-techno played and sweated out with real passion.

It's not just the project's name that evokes jazz, but also the feeling that runs through the whole record: four pieces with no clear-cut structure, in which techno's power trio freely indulges in freer digressions, within a continuous flow of rhythm and dub atmospheres. That's how "Pattern 1" opens, in blazing fashion, with the cimbalom's dance kicking things off and the bassline chasing after it, in a whirling duet. Before long, though, the track changes face: room is made for an uncertain, tribal kick drum, split in two by a synth melody that lights everything up. You barely have time to nod your head before the mood shifts again, as if it were the most natural thing in the world: that's what improvising means.

"Pattern 2" has a decidedly different attitude: setting aside the warm dub matrix typical of the Moritz sound, it dives headfirst into Ripatti's icy atmospheres. The rhythm brakes sharply, ambient takes over and the melody gives way to a vaguely industrial gait. "Pattern 3" dusts off basslines straight out of Kingston and builds a suburban dancehall, while small melodic hints, tremendously nocturnal and urban, push their way through the jungle of beats. Slowly the sound thins out, making room for the last track, "Pattern 4", where an extremely stylish mid-tempo (the father of all dubstep) rests on a solid bed of synths, which rises imposingly at the end to bring down the curtain.

Vertical Ascent isn't a record that redraws the genre's boundaries. It's simply a great work of bassline and artistry, born of three of the finest dancefloor minds in contemporary electronic music. The human warmth hovering amid this record's cold electronic components reminds us that behind the machine there is a man, and inside the man a heart pulsing with passion.

If one must look for flaws, we could point to a few compositional hiccups, due to somewhat uneven writing, and also to the fact that this remains, after all, a project born and best experienced live.

Vertical Ascent, in its own way, elegantly sidesteps both problems and shows how, sometimes, getting your hands dirty can be damn fun.

If 2009's vertical ascent wove together a cold-sounding thread with a heart beating very much alive, the new Horizontal Structures completely reverses course. The sonic interplay takes on new textures and new shades. The debut's ambient substrates are softened in favor of far jazzier lines, fading krautrock touches – always gentle, never pushed too far – and a pervasive sense of mild warmth. The beauty of this record lies precisely in how suspended it feels, as if it never truly lands a blow. But don't mistake that for a flaw: on the contrary, it's a game played with a foil, an exercise in balance and calculated restraint. A chilly mood blankets the five pieces, over which the guitars and double basses of Mr. Tikiman and ECM's Marc Muellbauer are layered.

The subdued, abstract ambient of the opening track bears Delay's unmistakable stamp, amid gusts and chronic intangibility; the second piece plays hide-and-seek between cosmic 1970s Germany, tribal-leaning beats and sonic futurism. The journey, which on first listen might seem almost exhausting, tears through the veil of Maya, revealing itself openly in near-funky guitar loops on the horizon, submerged beneath a rippling, wave-like dub.

"Horizontal Structure 4", on the other hand, is perhaps the piece that most recalls "Vertical Ascent": games of refraction, coldness, mirrors and broken glass, which gradually give way to structures that are first jazz and then verge on pure improvisation. The final track brings things full circle, edging toward dark-ambient scenery.

It's truly impossible not to love these three. They play almost in slow motion, and yet they shift into fourth gear, overtake, wave goodbye and win by a mile. If this were a fencing match, it'd be 15-0.

The Violence of Rhythm – Ripatti

Already prolific with a trio of EPs that had highlighted the composer's curiosity for footwork, released during a period of extraordinary flourishing for the genre, the project under the name Ripatti culminates in Fun Is Not A Straight Line, released by Planet Mu, finally finding a more expansive, structured outlet. RP Boo? Traxman? Jlin? You can safely set them aside, because there's no trace of their sensibility here. Almost in line with the abrasive compositions of the "Rakka" / "Rakka II" pairing, the concept behind Ripatti's footwork favors an acidic, belligerent vision, amplifies the hallucinogenic character of the bpm, and encourages the wildest possible treatment of samples. The commitment underpinning it is certainly substantial.

Whirling, unstoppable like a hurricane caught at the peak of its power, Ripatti gives his footwork the most violent, complex inflection possible: there's no shortage of fun, in fact spelled out right in the title, yet everything escapes any basic canon, granting his patterns ample room for expression. The producer steers his creation with a director's firm hand, amid snares that cut like blades, decontextualized rap references, and atmospheric backdrops that nonetheless only serve to emphasize the aggressive succession of the tracks. With only one track exceeding four minutes, Delay's approach ensures the running times are always kept succinct: even stripped of soul filigrees and jazz echoes, the assault always stays sharply focused, with each individual idea clearly present.

While it's true that perhaps in the more direct and pop moments it lacks the warmth that would have made the rhythmic geometries better suited to the context, where abstraction and technique are foregrounded the touch proves far more effective. Having fun, in short, is possible, but we're a long way from four-on-the-floor kicks, velvety lines, muffled progressions: here you first have to go through a deep purification ritual, discharge your rage, your inner poison. The producer is no longer interested in straight lines, and in this exhilarating race against rhythm, you almost feel the urge to lose yourself.

Contributions by Antonio Ciarlett, Vassilios Karagiannis ("Fun Is Not A Straight Line")

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