An imagined pandemic salvaged the career of the elusive Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti. For nearly two decades as Vladislav Delay, Ripatti pulled together strands of minimal techno and beat-driven bombast, ambient glow and gnarly dissonance, making strange chimeras of oppositional moods. Delay’s best work, like 2000’s Multila, suggested hearing the thrum of a distant nightclub in some dangerous, unfamiliar land—enticing but ominous, as though reaching the source would be more trouble than it was worth.
After 2014’s sublime Visa earned his music a role alongside the likes of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Hildur Guðnadóttir in the soundtrack to The Revenant, Ripatti disappeared. As if balking at the prospect of wider success, he sold most of his studio equipment and retreated into isolated experimentation. “I seem to self-destruct,” he later admitted. During the last few years, though, Ripatti repeatedly ventured far above the Arctic Circle, to locations so remote the sun sometimes doesn’t rise or set for days or months on end. Those arctic hikes helped inform his score for Ivalo, a Finnish television series where a mysterious virus that makes people exceptionally evil takes root in the icy region and spreads.
Ripatti’s motifs for the show are what you might expect, like haunting electronic passages that suggest something monstrous and unspeakable or a curious pattern that reflects an investigator’s unresolved questions. But his experiences in the far North prompted Ripatti to consider the impact that such a harsh climate can have on a body and mind, how it can make simply living resemble an endless war, a struggle you will eventually lose. Rakka—his first album of new material in six years and the most compelling work of his career—is a breathless, terrifying newsreel about those battles with nature.
In recent years, a horde of producers have approximated the sensations of black metal, originally a bristling response to the pleasantries of Scandinavian society and the perils of its environment. From WIFE to Ben Frost and even Fuck Buttons, these experiments have often been fascinating and occasionally thrilling. But with Rakka, Delay comes closest to replicating the form’s primal frisson—that is, music that feels as ecstatic as it does existentially doomed. He harnesses the power of blast beats without actually using them and mines the urgency of screams without ever opening his mouth, getting to the core of black metal’s function without co-opting its form.
From end to end, Rakka thrives on instability and the fear it fosters. Its beats lock into a grid for only a minute or so at a time, allowing you just enough space to settle into a groove before dropping you into some cacophonous abyss. And its tones are so brittle that the sounds sometimes crumble like iron gone to rust, flaking into dust. “Rampa” slams between a minimal techno tick-tock and drum’n’bass bedlam during one 30-second span, between a rapturous nod to reggaeton and an industrial rush so acerbic it might make Prurient squirm during another. “Raajat” begins in a trance, its fluorescent hums swaddling arrhythmic paroxysms. But Delay slowly makes each element more severe, until the long tones suggest suffocation, the rhythms a fistfight. You fret over what comes next.
This unpredictability is a simulacrum for the harshest aspects of nature, the sort that threaten human survival in a million different ways. During “Raataja,” concussive bursts of jungle drums and sudden surges of curdled static cut across a pretty loop of pink noise, like barbaric gusts of wind during a snowstorm. Just when you adjust to the cycle, Delay sustains the fusillade, a tireless series of body blows. But they vanish in an instant, leaving you to reel from the whiplash. In the two seconds of silence before closer “Rasite” begins, you recognize just how severe and exhausting those six minutes had been. Even “Rasite,” which wants you to believe it is a comedown, is a feint, emitting slow sighs of placid sound that ultimately coil, like a snake ready to strike. Delay offers reprieves only for the glee of taking them away.
Many of the sounds here—eerie drones that hover like shadows, beats that are too big for their surroundings—recall Wolfgang Voigt’s recent work as GAS, especially 2018’s sprawling Rausch. But GAS’ records are forest baths in the dark, an invitation for immersion even if the night can seem a little scary. The environment that Rakka frames, however, wants to expel you without warning, pause, or mercy, if it cares about you at all. Here, nature’s very existence is a threat to your own.
Rakka is compelling no matter the context, a breathless cycle of terror and retreat that mirrors stresses as ancient as extreme climates and as modern as our frenetic news cycle. But it’s also accurate. I’ve spent extended chunks of the last five years in the woods—sometimes above the Arctic Circle, sometimes trudging through feet of snow on the rim of the Grand Canyon. I listened to Rakka for the first time without knowing anything about it and immediately found myself transported beyond my headphones and back to those wild places, intoxicated by the rush of circumstances that could have killed me. Thanks to the ubiquity of cameras capturing the world’s most isolated locales, you can now see what the world looks like from the side of some razor-thin, windswept perch in the Rockies; turn up Rakka and close your eyes, and I swear you can also understand how electrifying it feels.
