Originally issued in 2000 by Berlin's Chain Reaction, Sasu Ripatti's Multila arrived as a strange object within the orbit of Basic Channel. The third album under the Vladislav Delay moniker, it remains, more than two decades on, one of the most quietly radical statements to emerge from that lineage. The album compiles the Huone and Ranta 12-inches Ripatti had released on Chain Reaction across 1999 and 2000, refracting the Berlin label's dub-techno orthodoxy through a colder, more diffuse Finnish prism. Where the work of Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald sculpted hypnotic grids of low-end pressure, Ripatti's pieces dissolve the grid altogether. Beats decay into reverb tails before they fully form; bass figures hover at the threshold of sub-perception; voices and field fragments rise and recede like weather. As much informed by the long winters of his native Finland as by the templates of Basic Channel, SND, and the deep house lineages of the late '80s and '90s, the record stakes out a territory that has remained hard to place.
Its centre of gravity is Huone, twenty-two minutes of slow accretion, its kick drum surfacing and sinking beneath thick layers of clicks, dub displacement, and granular static. Around it cluster six pieces, Ranta, Raamat, Viite, Karrha, Pietola, and Nesso, each an exercise in textural opacity, resonant decay and rhythmic suggestion. The tactility is unmistakable, the result of analogue chains run nose to tail through hardware, tape, and D&M's all-analogue mastering. There is dirt in the signal, and breath. Heard today, the record sits closer to the work of Thomas Köner, Pole and the early ambient ventures of Wolfgang Voigt than to the dancefloor it ostensibly addressed.
"Multila is a tool to learn about the unintentional states of us," Ripatti wrote in 2000. "It is a way to see our own emotional loops. Multila is a soundtrack for vision."
This Keplar edition presents the album for the first time as a double vinyl, restored from the original masters by Rashad Becker and cut by Kassian Troyer at D&M, with revised artwork by Marc Hohmann. For two decades available only on the original Chain Reaction CD or scattered across the 12-inches that fed it, Multila finally arrives in the format its swirling depths always called for.
