Dag Rosenqvist – Vraen Centrum

Expansive, futuristic, and drenched in rain, Dag Rosenqvist’s Vraen Centrum takes listeners into a night-shrouded metropolis, and it’s a stunning sight to behold. Its streets brim with bleeding synths, which shine like jewels and gleam like neon-lit logos. Vraen Centrum’s music wears its influences on its sleeves, brandishing them like an impressive set of tattoos. Elements of neo-noir, science fiction, cyberpunk, and tech noir populate every corner and every side-street, but it also has one foot in the past, thanks to its love affair with the 80’s. All of its luminescence and vivid, neon-drenched colours can be found within Rosenqvist’s mainframe, but the music also walks at a steady pace from one track to the next, unfolding patiently, giving this new LP a heavy soundtrack vibe, like Blade Runner in an alternate dimension.

The synths are as cold as rain, not really emitting much light apart from a brief flash or an intermittent strobe of neon. Rosenqvist has always attempted to advance his musicality, and his music is able to break free of a concrete style or genre because of this. The immersive music is made all the more so by ambient segues, which offers a respite from a harsh-bladed synth. At one time, a guitar doses itself up on thick reverb, and its notes splash into deep puddles. Even then, though, the police-state-synths are never far away, tracking the softer notes with its sentient A.I. Thick electronic slabs thrum overhead, piercing the air like the rotating blades of a future-tech helicopter. Those growling synths seem hungry, somehow, and this release is sure to whet your appetite.

www.laaps.bandcamp.com

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