REVIEW: Vladislav Delay - in a lawless world there is strength in numbers

Ambient/glitch maestro makes a glorious return to his vintage style and tries to drop it under the radar! Do not let him get away with it!

34:41 // December 31st, 2025 // self-released

I’m not sure who advised Finnish glitch/dub/techno mastermind Sasu Ripatti (aka Vladislav Delay, Luomo, Uusitalo) to stealth drop his latest full-length on the 31st December – probably no one at all, let alone any of the sub-thousand inhabitants of the northern Finnish island he calls home – but when I went into it expecting outtakes and shrapnel, I was shocked to find that it not only reprises his vintage dub/glitch style from the ‘00s and early ‘10s, but that it makes for his most focused and commanding album experience since at least 2012’s Kuopio.

Although in a lawless world there is strength in numbers (henceforth LWSN) firmly turns the page on the industrial/noise chapter Ripatti brought to us in the early ‘20s with the Rakka albums and Isoviha, it retains much of those records’ restlessness. This is heard most obviously on the fourth track “lawless world (numbers)”, which practically transplants Isoviha’s mangled whirring into a smoother, dub-prone framework, but it plays more often as an agitated take on the clicking and churning of his earlier style (one thinks in particular of the jagged contours of his 2004 outing Demo(n) Tracks). The glitches here come thick and fast, and they’re more percussive than his usual fare: you will need a dedicated headphone listen to hear many of these tones resonate as more than, say, a distracting set of mouse clicks.

Get over that hurdle and the prismatic criss-crossing of a single, suspended synth chord across an ever-changing and somehow endlessly captivating set of rhythmic permutations proves itself as classic Ripatti. The man’s instincts as a jazz drummer are as evident as ever here, and no one else within his field comes close to the way he serves up such an organic set of ever-varying patterns with such relentless precision. Hearing that uniquely human sense of rhythm in the midst of such self-flauntingly artificial aesthetics has always given his work an X-factor, and LWSN is the X-iest showing this has had in some time.

The record’s first two tracks play as virtually the same piece separated without boundary, and they bring to mind Ripatti’s 2001 one-hour one-song masterpiece Anima in their relentless mining of a single pocket of a single soundworld as such. That album made its mark with vast, buoyant grace, which Ripatti’s more forceful approach here largely eschews in favour of immediate impact.

As such it’s a welcome change of pace when the third track “lawless world (number)” flips the script with a more staggered outing into syncopated techno, its glitchy intrusions sparser and less insistent and its groove more accommodating (I am reminded of the ever-unheralded, still-excellent RV8 from his contemporary Aoki Takamasa). The record’s stylistic unity is striking, and easily enough to make for a satisfying album experience — and as such, it’s a shame that the closer “lawless world (numer)” terminates it so abruptly and matter-of-factly. This is likely by design, especially for a track so set on recurrently writing and un-writing itself, but it nonetheless makes for a muted ending to the detriment of what is otherwise a thoroughly well-realised overall package.

No matter! There is no aesthetic plane I would rather live in than the one this album revisits, however chaotically, and the under-the-radar reception Ripatti seems to have been angling for with his release strategy seems a waste given how many would (will) justifiably herald this record as a return to form! Whatever the case, it was 2025’s final eleventh-hour shake-up and exactly the reason why it’s never a bad call to defer one’s year-end appraisal past the end of December.

8/10

Further listening:

Vladislav Delay – Demo(n) Tracks & Anima
Aoki Takamasa – RV8
Alva Noto - HYbr:ID III
Oval - Dok