Finland"s Vladislav Delay gets more mileage out of less sonic material than almost anyone working in electronic music today. In 2000 and 2001 alone under the aliases Uusitalo and Luomo, he"s explored minimal techno and a thoroughly idiosyncratic version of house music (respectively), and he has returned to his original moniker for the fourth full-length Vladislav Delay release. Unlike minimal techno artists like Thomas Brinkmann, whose metronomic beats are intended to recall (and are sometimes even created by) the precisely recurrent click of a horizontal scratch on a vinyl record, Anima travels out to the land where the beat is implied rather than stated. Not that there are no percussive sounds--aside from the continuous oscillation of two sustained keyboard chords and similarly circumscribed single-note melodies, the bulk of the sounds are scratches, whirrs, clicks, and buzzes that ebb and flow with the regularity of calm tidal water, but never outline the steady 1 through 4 of the dance floor. For just over an hour (bookended with some contrastingly tense conversational snippets), this is all that happens, and either most of the music is created by real-time knob twiddling or it is generated by unprecedented degrees of programmed randomness. But the upshot is remarkably varied and unrepetitive, in the sense of strictly audible sequences and loops. --Bob Bannister