STRAKTOBEAM: A Five-Stars Universe

Lost in Finland, the idea to find another land to foot took root when

From the sky did dive in the eyes the sight of five stars coming from some kind of cosmic place.

These five stars are actually the five members of a band from Finland:

STRAKTOBEAM, stargazers who built their spaceship out of vintage synthesizers in order to make cosmic synth-pop,

Have just popped out from the cloud of their imaginative instrumentals.

Their creativity has dropped their latest single, titled ‘Melange’.

Their music, synth-pop, electronic, and essentially instrumental is definitely a unique experience: you’re actually following a story.

Besides, according to the band, the story of this song, ‘Melange’ “tells a story of a crew of interstellar space travellers who have abandonded their home planet and are searching for a new home.
Their journey is one of many dangers, and our little crew maneuvers from one peril to another.
How will their journey end? And what is the story behind the enigmatic Moai statues?
The name of the song, Melange, is of course a reference to the geriatric spice from the Dune books by Frank Herbert.

As you shall notice, their musical universe is composed of the sparkling constellations of Science-Fiction, Cinematographic references (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), Video Games influence and Travelling and its Wanderlust, to say the least.

This is the enjoyable invitation to a new journey, daring your fears of any Monsters:

https://soundcloud.com/straktobeam/monsters-timelapse-edit-check-out-the-video

This track provides the same vibes as an South East Asian atmosphere, and gets you travelling without moving.

To deepen this idea of Travelling, one of the five members of this Finnish band accepted to answer a few questions:

Interview

1) Could you just tell me about this Travelling idea? Have you been travelling a lot, enough to be wanting to share your journeys experience through your music?

“We’re five people from Finland, and like most Finnish people we do like to travel quite a bit and as frequently as possible. Some of us have even spent longer bits of time in foreign places, such as South East Asia, Russia and Canada.

And naturally, the more you travel, the more foreign cultures start to interest and intrigue you, giving you an yearning to find out and experience more and more.

However, I think foreign places and culture is not something we specifically aim to bring into our music, at least on a conscious level. Instead, we feel strongly that good interesting music should be a journey on it’s own. If a song is powerful and has an interesting mood, it by itself should take you “someplace”.

[…] Since our music is mostly instrumental, it relies quite a bit on the imaginative force of the listener to let it take you on a journey. Most often, our songs aim to take the listener on a “cosmic” trip, but that could be space, underground techno joint, an underwater deep dive or just a trip to the school library.

The song titles, like “Melange” of the Frank Herbert “Dune” series, or “La Planete Sauvage” referencing the excellent animation movie by  René Laloux are just traveling tips referencing what we had in mind while making the songs. When playing live, we employ safe made (or at least self-cut) visuals that kind of enforce these themes upon the watcher.

Another aspect in relation to traveling and our music is the fact that currently our band members live in three quite distant cities in Finland. So most often when we’re actually in the same room making music, it’s on a trip of it’s own, your away from your day-to-day routines, kind of like on a holiday. Perhaps that sort of escapism is reflected onto our tunes.”

2) Another opoint interesting, you salute by saying “Namasté”. Then you have that reference to Moai Statues. How do you relate to these different cultural differences? Or what do these inspire you?

“Regarding Moai Statues – they and their making is a concept that has fascinated one of our synth players, Otto, for quite a while. It seems incredibly that such vast monuments were build by quite ancient and primitive cultures.

We like to play around with the idea that perhaps their making was fasciliated by help from foreign – meaning here extra-terrestial – help, and similar ideas can easily be imagined of many of the ancient era wonders. It’s also related to the question of ”where did live come from to Earth?”

There, you just remind us of Nat Nye, who’s himself fascinated in the same way, but regarding the Egyptian Pyramids. It is funny to see how Anciant monuments’ greatness seem inspirational for an artist.

“While these kind of ideas are fun to think about and express in musical terms, I guess these are riddles that might not be fully answered any time soon.”

“”Namasté” on the other hand, is I guess a regular Hindi greeting. For us it’s not really about Indian culture per se but more about exotism and the wonders of different cultures.

Simply put, it sounds interseting and cool to us, which is why we use it! […] we aim to express the yearning to experience and discover new cultures and experiences. To put it more simply, it’s about the excitation of the journey more than trying to convey what was at the destination.”

Thank you once again STRAKTOBEAM.

Discovering has been one great experience. To discover more of their universe, you can dive into their Facebook Page.