It's been more than a decade since Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti, under his Luomo alias, redefined expectations for vocal house with his micro-masterpiece Vocalcity. In the years since, as vocal house has made a comeback in more full-throated, traditionalist terms, Ripatti's kept Luomo shifting, his productions growing increasingly crisp and functional, gradually sweating off the liquid murk of his early releases to emerge as cold and bright tech-house.
While Luomo's evolved, Ripatti's other best known alias, Vladislav Delay, has remained devoted to a singular vision of ambient techno and cold digital dub. With few digressions-- such as last year's exploration of acoustic space and live instrumentation with the Vladislav Delay Quartet-- Vladislav Delay's releases have progressed as a series of subtle tweaks and refinements. Ripatti's as studious and attentive a sound designer as he is a reinventer of genres, and though he saves his game-changing leaps forward for Luomo, his variations on Vladislav Delay's themes are immaculately produced and almost as engrossing.
If there isn't already, there should be a rule that Vladislav Delay only put out albums in the wintertime. Whether it's the influence of Ripatti's northern longitude or merely a reflection of some internal aesthetic, Vladislav Delay's records give off a distinctly frozen feel. Synths hum and hiss white noise like cold wind, drums clatter like ice or crunch like snow underfoot, rhythms break apart from themselves like ice floes. Beyond the individually chilly elements, there's the overall sense of low light and hibernatory slowness: The tracks play out like a still landscape troubled by only the occasional moving figure. If that makes Vantaa sound more like background than foreground, fair enough. Yet rather than being dull or inhospitable, it makes for a consistently habitable environment.
Some pieces gradually come together-- "Narri" coalesces into a little melody, as does "Levite", the latter teasing a skipping beat out of its soft swaying keys and evaporative sounds. Others, like the title track, seem to be carefully breaking apart as they unfold. "Lauma" might be the most unexpected track, and also the album's late climax, an initial echo turning into a rapid fan-buzzing vibration and then a pneumatic double-time drum figure not so far removed from gabber.
While any given moment of the album offers a satisfying sonic foothold, you truly get a sense of Ripatti's skill and vision over the entire course of the record: Hearing any 10 seconds, you might think the stuff static, but Vantaa's glacial movements carve unpredictable channels. In a way, this music is as simultaneously functional and pleasurable as Luomo's more active house tracks, only it's for an opposite function-- and a more sedate set of pleasure centers.
