SUOKAS The New Cycle LP

Living, breathing electronica as indebted to techno as it is improvised orchestration, ‘The New Cycle’ blends Suokas’ evocative field recordings, percussion and piano playing with whirring instrumental compositions written for violin, cello, contrabass,
flute, saxophone and traditional Karelian instruments myankeri and liru.

“The idea was to make an electronic album without electronics,” Suokas says of the album, a process that involved disseminating live instrumental recordings and reshaping them into rhythmic techno patterns. “The result sounds like
a surrealistic imitation, you can’t actually name what you hear.”

It is a rich and immersive textural palette of sounds - ‘Skygger’ (Norwegian for shadows) sees a minimal interplay between jostling techno-cut percussion and vast, sweeping strings; ‘Ruva’ is a bouncing 4x4 rhythm track flecked with erratic percussion; ‘Subsekvenser’ is circled by an apocalyptic uneasiness, strings craning against fuzzy field recordings before the creeping ‘Fleberbett’ moves in, its pitch-shifting strings flowing forward and back.