Dark Connection

Dark Connection appeared on 29 October 2021, and the place to start is the dedication printed on it: to Kentaro Miura. The author of Berserk — the man Anton Kabanen has named again and again as the starting point of his music — died while this record was being made. The thirteen songs read almost as an answer to that. "Dark New World," "To The Last Drop Of Blood" and "Broken Survivors" follow the manga, while "Highway To Mars" and "Moonlight Rendezvous" step into the world of the anime Armitage III, and are partly Blade Runner-inspired, as Kabanen explains. It opens on a song called exactly that, "Blade Runner," runs through "My Dystopia," and closes on two covers: Manowar's "Battle Hymn" and Michael Jackson's "They Don't Care About Us." The synths are further forward than on anything before it — Italo disco, Eurobeat and symphonic colour. Kabanen is direct about where that comes from: the music of the Nintendo and Super Nintendo. Very simple sound chips and limited resources, he says, pushed composers to write ageless melodies. He again produced, recorded and mixed everything himself at Sound Quest Studio, with Pohjalainen mastering and Roman Ismailov on artwork. It entered the Finnish chart at number one and went gold. The video for "Moonlight Rendezvous" was Katri Ilona Koppanen's first as director and won a festival's music video of the month.