Electro has become a very serious genre, at times it even adopts a grave and stringent aspect. Cyberia balances what have become poles of the sound. Rosenberg and Koskivaara return to electro-funk and hip-hop roots, they return to that futuristic sci-fi glaze and fired style.
Finland and electro seem to have a very good relationship. Maybe it’s the landscape, perhaps it’s the weather, but for whatever reason the northern European nation has produced some top quality machine musicians. Mono Junk, Morphology, under the letter “B” you’ll find a pair that have been quiet over the past years. Blastromen first cut their teeth on their homeland’s X0X Records before migrating to Dominance Electricity. Five years ago the pair of Mika Rosenberg and Sami Koskivaara brought out their second album, Reality Opens, and as we know quite a bit has changed since 2013, so what have the duo to say half a decade on?
“Into The Void” is classic Blastromen. Lyrics saturated in vocoder static are couple with funk soaked chords, computer bleeps and speeding rhythms. This is future electrofunk, upgrading the classic sounds of the genre for a new audience. As is to be expected, the themes of Cyberia focus on a not so distant society, one where man and machine are gelling as one and technology is playing an even more pivotal role. However, the Blastromen canon is not one of preaching but one of prophesying with meaning being left to the listener to discern. Amidst this vision is some cracking music. “Load Reload” is cut from the same circuitboard as “Into The Void.” Beats and words are fired through fibre optic cabling, racing with and colliding into banks of bass and cascading keys. The croaking vocals of “Outsider” follows, a banking and bending track, before a hard-hitting call to arms comes in the form of “Unite Arise.” The production across the entire outing is exceptional, the sound being glass-like clear with sounds sizzling from speaker cones. Brighter tones are also present. Take “Signals,” an uplifting work where classic electro tones are mixed with warmer currents or the full and undeniably fun “Light Traveller” with its huge laser-beam hooks. A lesser explored avenue are instrumental pieces, two numbers without lyrics bookending the ten track collection. The bold and brilliant title piece opens. By far the slowest track of this third album, this grandiose work of trumpeting synth and orchestral movements is truly superb. “Eternity” is a gloriously grand piece. Despite there being some vocal samples, the main thrust is a triumphal score, one of building bars and cold blasts swaddled in grandeur.
Electro has become a very serious genre, at times it even adopts a grave and stringent aspect. Cyberia balances what have become poles of the sound. Rosenberg and Koskivaara return to electro-funk and hip-hop roots, they return to that futuristic sci-fi glaze and fired style as they add a little bit more fun back to the sometimes overtly austere proceedings. With the world we’re living in, sometimes we definitely need a bit more fun and a little less austerity.
Cyberia is available on Dominance Electricity. [Shop]
