Royksopp hit frequency overload on the third instalment of their Profound Mysteries multimedia series.
“I wanna give you some good frequencies,” Royksopp declared on Eple, the track by which their 2001 debut Melody AM became most widely recognised for.
The Norwegian pair from Tromso in the Arctic Circle made good on their word, easily outgrowing the early 2000’s chillout movement in the process.
They carried on doing so up until 2014’s aptly titled The Inevitable End, a release which was accompanied by an announcement that it would represent their final music in the boring old long player format.
Or so we thought.
Friends since their early teenage years, Svein Berger and Torbjørn Brundtland never stopped their creative train of thought, curating the Lost Tapes series out of their apparent sabbatical, but at the beginning of 2022 the duo sheepishly admitted they were ‘crawling back’ (their words) with a new multimedia project that would be called Profound Mysteries and, again in their words, would duly consider ‘the unknowability of the universe’.
The visual wing of the project would/does include futuristic and abstract graphical content from the film production company Bacon, and musically the public have been party to not one but three distinctly-album-looking launch events spread over the course of the year, the chapters innovatively entitled I, II and III.
Everyone will be way ahead of us here, but III marks the final episode of this odyssey as once again Berger and Brundtland collaborate with a number of high-end guests across pieces that are generally much longer than can be accommodated on radio as a medium.
Deeper thinkers than us will therefore conclude that this is an experience designed to be immersive and streaming-friendly, one that shows that Royksopp have secretly missed us. A lot.
Cynics might think that the third instalment of anything is rarely worth waiting for, but in fact III is arguably the series pinnacle, depending on how you take your dreamy Scandinavian synth pop.
Opener So Ambiguous is melancholy, retro-cinematic and heavy on strings and flutey breezes, but that’s an old trick used by skilled producers to get our minds in float away mode. From this point on there’s a euphoric, final show of the tour feeling, although the bangers are generally of the sad variety.
In this mode – as on the spiralling, flawless pop of Me&Youphoria – the ground is familiar and the execution flawless, and Stay Awhile, which co-stars long-time associate Susanne Sundfør, goes long instead on pared back beats and yearning, the sort of gentle deep space vibes with which careers were built.
Having proven their mastery of one thing it’s immediately time to do it all over again on another, this time Alison Goldfrapp nestling up to some fabulously Kraftwerkian tekno on The Night, a track that almost makes you yearn to get some of that robot thing yourself.
It’s when in this upbeat mode that III is most fun and effective, with the Maurissa Rose-led Feel It twisting mightily like an Oslo disco orphan, whilst on Just Wanted To Know Astrid S helps out by delivering a sensual clip of downtempo R&B that proverbially slaps, if only just for fun.
It’s not all party-in-a-fjord however, with the nearly ten-minute Speed King and closer Like An Old Dog much more cosmic than their playful counterparts, the latter a dusky, understated finish that slightly downplays what went before.
Royksopp always gave us some good frequencies, until they didn’t anymore. Profound Mysteries III is full of them though, causing a good frequency overload that only proves how much we’ve missed them.
Just don’t call it an album.
