Soundtracks often pretend to guide you through a story. "Strive – Original Music & Outtakes" does something less polite: it drops you into a malfunctioning system and lets you figure out where the exits used to be.

Timo Kaukolampi has spent years navigating the intersection between kosmische drift, industrial pulse and something colder, more clinical. With K-X-P and Op:l Bastards, he built a reputation for music that feels engineered rather than composed, as if circuitry had developed a taste for rhythm. This first solo soundtrack doesn’t mark a departure. It sharpens the edges.

The premise behind "Strive" - a near-future world where technological obsession has quietly replaced human connection - could easily collapse into familiar dystopian aesthetics. Kaukolampi avoids that trap by refusing to aestheticize the future. Instead, he degrades it. The sound palette is fractured, corroded, intentionally incomplete. Minimalism here isn’t elegant reduction; it’s damage control.

Tracks like “Beginning” and “Max Speaks” sketch out a sonic architecture built from pulses that feel slightly misaligned, like a machine running just off calibration. There’s tension, but not the cinematic kind that resolves into release. It accumulates, compresses, lingers. Even the shortest pieces - “Corpse”, “Overpass” - function less as transitions and more as interruptions, abrupt reminders that continuity is optional.

What makes this release particularly revealing is the inclusion of outtakes and discarded sketches. Normally, these function as archival curiosities, polite extras for completists. Here, they feel essential. The discarded versions - “First Drive”, “End Titles”, “Drive Movement” - don’t just show alternative ideas; they expose the process of erosion, the gradual stripping away of anything too stable, too resolved. You hear decisions being made, or more accurately, unmade.

There’s a lineage here that stretches from the Berlin school’s expansive electronics to the austere patience of Éliane Radigue, but Kaukolampi compresses those influences into something more volatile. His sound doesn’t expand outward. It folds in on itself, creating dense, pressurized environments rather than open sonic landscapes.

Released by Öm Sound, "Strive - Original Music & Outtakes" feels less like a finished statement and more like a controlled exposure of a working mind. Not everything here is complete, and that’s precisely the point. Completion would imply stability, and this music has no interest in reassuring you that things hold together.

Listening to it without the film is a slightly disorienting experience, like reading fragments of a technical manual for a machine you’ve never seen. But the emotional logic still leaks through: obsession, distance, the faint, stubborn trace of connection trying to survive in hostile circuitry.

It’s not immersive in the usual sense. It doesn’t surround you. It encloses you. And once you’re inside, it becomes clear that the system isn’t broken. It’s functioning exactly as designed. Which is, admittedly, worse.