Vladislav Delay is Tired of Boring Old House Music

The style of Vladislav Delay's new EP, Ripatti.04, could be called "Finnish footwork," though any resemblance it bears to the fast-paced, abstract footwork genre from Chicago, he tells me, is a result of either osmosis or pure coincidence. "I just lost interest in slow grooves and straight house grooves some years ago," he says—so naturally he "started experimenting with faster tempos." When asked if there were Finnish footwork dancers to accompany his tracks, he bluntly replied, "I have no idea."

His new record, produced with fellow Finn, Twwth (prounced "teeth") has all of the clipped triplet patterns, machine-gun clicks, and relentless loops of fury that you might hear in the outer reaches of footwork. It is raw, syncopated bass music with little of the meticulous sound design you'd expect from the veteran sound artist. The collaboration might seem like a drastic departure from his more sprawling, semi-ambient works, or from his dubby techno recordings—until you look through his catalogue and realize he's tried just about everything.

Vladislav Delay, née Sassu Rippati, has made euphoric dancefloor-focused vocal house music as Luomo, machinic tech-house as Uusitalo, and a whole bunch of noise in between, with chaotic live sets that have inspired a generation of performers in the more experimental wings of dance music. He occasionally joins minimalist innovators Moritz von Oswald and Max Loderbauer to form the Moritz von Oswald trio, playing live percussion and electronics in an otherwordly live set that drifts through lonely free jazz noodling and weighty shades of dub.

Between all of these different experiments, Ripatti seems mostly concerned with literally breaking dance music out of the box. "I find it pretty boring how strict the tempos and rules are," he says, referring to the current dance music landscape. For him it feels like a "kind of freedom homogenized." After 15 years of putting our records, he's no longer concerned with staying on trend. "I don't make the music with the conditions or standards of that culture," he continues. "I've stopped caring about any of that—I just make the music I feel like."

Pictured alongside the drool-worthy analogue hardware porn he posts on Facebook are the bizarre Frankestein instruments he makes by hand. Scrolling through his photo collection, gear nerds will wonder what the hell he could be doing with a de-stringed lute, a power drill, contact microphones, two hand cymbals, and an eggbeater (is that an eggbeater?). His most recent post was a clothing rack hung with various bits of homemade percussion crafted from sheet metal and industrial equipment, and another shows a cardboard box full of electric toothbrushes and razors—presumably to be used for their distinct vibrating frequencies.

His new EP, however, is less about cosmic revelations or tinkered electronics, and more about slamming your face. "With this EP, there's more focus on the DJ mentality. That's what Matti [Twwth] brought in, and what I wanted to try out; where the compromise goes between music being interesting and still working in clubs and being DJ playable."

Twwth, who co-owns the Helsinki-based label Signal Life, is much more of a club composer than Rippati. His most recent solo release "Thousand Million" was a four-track EP of unapologetically raw, overdriven grime mutations, and you can hear how the two came together on Ripatti.04 with Vladislav's moments of near chaos and Twwths's more opaque, banging drum programming.

"It was an eye-opener to see how Matti works and makes music," Rippati says of their collaboration. He was floored by his partner's ability to write music armed only with Ableton and a laptop—no controllers or instruments needed. "Give me a laptop and I can type an email, but music—I can't imagine coming out of it. Matti does his music basically with a laptop and can be anywhere with his headphones and finish off a track." Their collaborative EP is out now on Vladislav Delay's limited vinyl-only record label, also called Rippati, which operates out of an island municipality off the coast of Finland. With such a singular and unconcerned vision, it would make sense to find Ripatti on an island, wouldn't it?

Rippati.04 is available on vinyl only, but you can listen to clips of the EP exclusively through THUMP. Order it on Boomkat.