Keplar Vinyl & 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: 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: Arovane evolved quickly during the early stages of his career. The German producer became known for a gossamer-light strain of ambient electronica which he has continued to explore up to the present day, but his first albums such as Atol Scrap (on cult label DIN) and Tides (on City Centre Offices) featured elegantly sculpted beats alongside pastoral melodic flourishes. Following Atol Scrap's reissue recently, Keplar turn their attention to Tides for a remastered revisit, and it's lost none of its charm in 22 years. There are moments of fragile beauty which point to the direction Arovane was heading in, but there are still some brilliantly programmed drums which rightly established him as a dazzling talent during a boom era for downtempo electronica.

Review: Shuttle358 is the moniker of Californian producer Dan Abrams, a chap who clearly understands what 'sound art' should sound like. Back in the early-2000s he was forging ahead of most contemporaries working within electronica by releasing a stream of veritable statements of intent about the use of laptops as actual instruments, making beautiful, often serene tracks that felt resolutely human despite the kit they were made on being fundamentally non-organic.

Chessa picks up where he last left off, but then rockets into the stratosphere, living up to both artist and label name in the process. This isn't simply a case of getting back in the saddle, mind. Yes, we can safely say this is ambient territory. And the work does feel born from person, not machine. But things are more detailed and less stripped and pared back, offering bold nuances within his trademark spatial refrains

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: 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.