VLADISLAV DELAY Vinyl & CDs

Review: Sasu Ripatti continues to plunge into techno abstraction through his Hide Behind The Silence series. It's but one outlet for the seemingly constant stream of innovative sound emerging from the Finnish pioneer's studio, and on this fourth 10" he's offering up more compelling studies in noise, texture, rhythm and space. 'Death Of A Bassdrum' seems to take aim at techno by burying a 4/4 kick under a twitchy, uncomfortable bed of scuffs and scrapes, while 'Post-Mortem' diverts into space-building sonics where found sounds and artful reverb create a vibrant, three-dimensional space to explore with your mind's eye.

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: Vladislav Delay can manipulate sound like few others. Where he gets his ideas from is anyone's guess but we're presented with a laid more of them here in the first of five EPs in a series. This one finds the man born Sasu Ripatti deconstructing his soundscapes into whirring machines, metallic textures and chopped dup dubs. It is sound art as much as club music but will still work on the more adventurous dance floors out there. 'Three-Room Problem' in particular is an eerie and unsettling piece but one that leaves you wanting more.

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.