vladislav delay: entain

The Keplar label presents the next instalment in a series of reissues from the catalogue of Sasu Ripatti's seminal Vladislav Delay project. Originally released on Mille Plateaux, the vinyl edition of Entain from 2000 omitted two shorter tracks and included all others in an abridged form. With this reissue, the full album as it was pressed on CD is finally made available on vinyl. Besides a new remaster by Kassian Troyer, it was also given new cover artwork by Marc Hohmann that picks up on that of the Whistleblower reissue, released in early 2023 by Keplar. This serial visual approach highlights the conceptual continuity between those masterful explorations of the interplay between dub techniques, noise, and repetition. Ripatti himself had reworked material from 1999's Ele album for the release of Entain, which means that it can be considered the debut album proper of his Vladislav Delay project. It saw the Finnish artist aim more vigorously for abstraction than in his earlier releases as Vladislav Delay for labels such as Chain Reaction, which were collected on the iconic Multila compilation in 2000. To mark this special occasion, Multila will be repressed by Keplar with a new artwork that matches the new design of Whisteblower and Entain. Multila and Entain correspond with each other conceptually as much as they seem to differ on a musical level. From the very first moments of the 22-minute-long opener "Kohde," it becomes clear that Entain takes things further away from the dancefloor, aiming less for physical impact than for intellectual stimulation. A sort of electronic minimal music, it was primarily interested in letting discrete elements freely come into play with one another. Much like Multila, however, Entain highlighted the subtle differences embedded in what only feels like repetitive music. Entain took the dub techno formula further than any other record before it -- onwards into the realms of pure abstraction.