so
as you were asking, let's talk dub techno: minimal techno's spectral, glitchy-scratchy cousin that prioritises ambience, texture and borderline immaterial
dub grooves, largely consigning ye powerhouse four-to-the-floors of olde to spangled beats in resonant ghostspace. As far as orientation goes, anyone with a copy of
Quadrant Dub or
Biokinetics to hand can consider themselves ready-to-go, and the rest of you are in luck because dub techno history is a disarmingly succinct chronicle. It all starts with the iconic German duo Basic Channel, proliferates under their label Chain Reaction, traverses the fourth dimension via the clicks and cuts crowd at Mille Plateaux, and then crosses the pond courtesy of DeepChord (whence the legend continues) – there's deep exploration to be had behind each of these names, but as far as roadmaps go, you'll struggle to find a more user-friendly subgenre this side of trip-hop.
Now, Mr. Sasu Ripatti (aka Vladislav Delay, Luomo, Uusitalo and a generous handful of other aliases) offers a perfect insight into the two middle chapters of our dub fable. Before dropping one of the most accomplished glitch records of all time on Mille Plateaux with 2001's
Anima and thereafter starting his own label, his early career as Vladislav Delay comprised a short run on Chain Reaction that affirmed everything worth affirming about dub techno in a singles compilation entitled
Multila. The first of several successive high watermarks in Ripatti's most prolific set of years,
Multila is a perfect ground-zero within his lattice of discographies for new and returning audiences alike: this record is at once one of the most genre-faithful displays I've heard from him under any alias and a relatively robust showing for of his trademark patchwork of glints and refractions.
As with much of Ripatti's work,
Multila fares best when both its affinity for churning expanse and keen ear for granular details are each afforded enough space to all but lose themselves in one another. The opener "Ranta"'s bitesize genre manifesto proves a red herring here with its uncharacteristically succinct mapping of the distant heartbeat, greyscale backdrop and middle-distance grain all heard in so much great dub techno: the majority of these pieces thrive on capitalising on mammoth runtimes to stage dense gauntlets of ever-shifting contour. Detail, detail, detail is critical here – and a steep proportion of it is rhythmic. Testament to his background as a jazz drummer, Ripatti has always distinguished himself through his extraordinary knack for subtle discontinuity, and you'll hear this most overtly in the absurdly intricate gauntlet of fills and beat switches of the percussion-heavy highlight "Huone".
However, the full scope of this thing's rhythmic flair lies in its engagement with glitch – more than fully-realised beats, this proves the chief vehicle of development for many of these pieces. Take "Karha",
Multila's most spartan cut, which consists largely of droning ambience and carries itself almost entirely on the subtle disturbances Ripatti sends rippling through its lower frequencies. Hearing him hold the floor with so little provides all the insight you need into central appeal, not to mention a cogent teaser for the approach he took on his iconic follow-up,
Entain – and if "Karha"'s central draw is too placid for some, then get ye a load of how the following "Pietola" gradually augments a similar approach with a sequence of glitches so dense it could pass for tape disintegration. It's innovations like these that prelude exactly why Ripatti would soon be as comfortable a guest in the clicks-and-cuts elite of Mille Plateaux as he was at Chain Reaction, but while he would later turn his off-kilter placement of timbral snags into a fine science, his engagement with glitch here plays a lot looser, much more an unparseable stream of background code rather than the willful abuse of individual bugs. "Viite" offers the most palatable showcase here, in part thanks to the more melodic touch it brings to the record's liminal wipeout, but largely because it foregrounds crackling layers of interference to a particularly active extent, emphasising how critical a contribution Ripatti's matrix of textural scuffs makes for the organic qualities of his style.
It strikes to the heart of
Multila that such music, with such an unapologetic focus on artificial sounds and oblique structures, can be described as organic at all – it's through the contorted, treacle-clogged
pulse pulse Ripatti furnishes that it ultimately sticks the landing. Having done so, it boasts a rare, hybrid compatibility for both background and active listening, at once too dynamic to be called 'ambient' music yet too understated not to be. Such versatility doesn't necessarily translate into approachability – come at it in a bad headspace or with the wrong expectations, and it's an impenetrable slog full of itchy textures and perniciously slow progressions – but afford it the appropriate space and time (nowhere cramped, nowhere rushed) and it opens up as a disarmingly vitalised series of ear-catching nuances and engaging soundscapes, distantly luminous and richly prototypical of the Vladislavs we'd hear in Delays to come.
