Some records arrive like lightning bolts. Others, like stubborn tectonic shifts. Synestopia Variations 1–4 is firmly in the latter camp: the sound of Timo Kaukolampi wrestling for half a decade with a single piece of music, circling it, layering it, failing to tame it - until he gave up on the vertical tower of overdubs and let the beast uncoil horizontally, like a river spilling into several tributaries. The result is less a tracklist than a cartography of obsession.

Kaukolampi, still best known for co-piloting the black-clad mothership K-X-P, has always thrived on tension between the kosmische dream and the industrial grind. Here, he courts utopia by way of synesthesia, but the journey is never pastoral. It’s sweaty, fraught, joyous. Ringa Manner’s vocals glide through the opening variation like a spectral disco diva; Anssi NykÄnen’s drums pulse with the unwavering patience of a Finnish Jaki Liebezeit disciple; clarinets and trombones arrive like ghosts of chamber music, polite until they snarl. Tuomas Toivonen’s Moog E1, meanwhile, doesn’t so much solo as gnaw, stretching feedback into something oddly devotional.

The title is no empty pun. Synestopia feels like an imagined city where colours bleed into timbres and beats into shapes. Track three (“E1, PR99, SY-1, TR-808”) is practically urban planning in sound: grids of rhythm intersected by sudden bursts of feedback, an architecture that keeps threatening to collapse yet somehow doesn’t. By the time we reach “for Wolves”, the music has become almost mythological - two minutes of lupine trance, a ritual that feels both ridiculous and entirely necessary.

There are no lyrics to decode, but the album speaks in mottos: “All birds and men are sure to die, but songs may live forever”. It’s the final track’s title, but it reads like a confession. After five years, Kaukolampi knew he couldn’t perfect Synestopia - he could only release it into the world, to live or die on its own terms. The irony, of course, is that the imperfections are what make it immortal.

Humour hovers here too: in the absurd patience of building a disco cathedral out of clarinets, in the decision to split one song into four variations like some electronic hydra, in the knowing wink of a release that almost sounds like it’s parodying prog while being dead serious about its emotional core.

In the end, Synestopia Variations 1–4 isn’t a utopia at all - it’s a diary of failure, persistence, and eventual liberation. And perhaps that’s more honest: no city of perfection, but a map of how we keep moving forward when perfection refuses to come.