Turbo Knight is the alter ego of Finnish musician Antti Huurinainen. The follow-up to his album, Rise of The Machines, is in the final stages of production.
Navigators is a twelve track album that features a host of collaborations with other synthwave musicians. The longer tracks are around the five minute mark with most of the songs coming in at between 3:30 – 4:00 minutes in length. There is a mixture of instrumental and vocal tracks on the album too, which helps to break up the listening experience nicely. Along these same principals, there is also a scattering of live instruments overdubbed (saxophone and electric guitar), that refreshes the ear from an overdose of electronica.
Huurinainen recently made a trip to New York City and performed at the St. Vitus music room in Brooklyn, NY. The nightwave party was hosted by Samuel Valentine and brought together international synthwave acts under one roof. Turbo Knight was featured with a back-to-back set alongside Straplocked. Tokyo Rose and Faith in the Glitch were also there creating their unique forms of electronic music. The event was well attended, with no cover being charged early in the night and a small ticket fee after 11pm.
Now back home in his sunny Finland, Huurinainen caught up with Slickster Magazine via instant messenger to discuss Navigators and how he’s grown as a musician.
Slickster: How have you grown musically between Navigators and Rise of the Machines?
Turbo Knight: I think quite a bit. I’ve been testing out of lot of different scales and my mixdowns/masters has improved a lot. I’ve been building up a different kind of attitude towards making music. I use a lot more time nowadays on finalizing the tracks than i used to. Rise of the Machines was more like an collection of my tracks but with Navigators i tried to make it sound more complete by telling a story with the tracks. TBH. i’ve not grown much musically (25 years of trial and error behind) but i really feel that my mixdowns and masters has become so much better. Navigators is not mixed/mastered by me. Big thanks to Sandman (https://www.facebook.com/sandmantunes/) for the mixing and Viciousi (https://www.facebook.com/Vici0usi/) for the master!
Slickster: Seven of the twelve tracks on Navigators are collaborations between yourself and other musicians? Why so many and how did all of this come about?
Turbo Knight: I love to try things out musically so doing collabs with other people was a natural way of expanding my album to what it is right now. Doing music with people gives you so much more broader vision of what your music can be. Collaborating with so many people can be really time consuming but in the end it was worth it. I love every collab track on the album. The visitors made it go another level.
Slickster: The opening track of Navigators, The Prophecy, really captures the newly developed sound that you’ve been honing. It is multi-layered, well arranged and has plenty of ear candy that is normative of the synthwave genre. Can you take us through the process you used to write and create this ethereal trance-like track?
Turbo Knight: My process of writing is usually really chaotic. Usually i have no idea what kind of track i’m starting to do and even the bpm can go up- or downwards during the creation. From what i remember doing the prophecy i started with creating the bass synth it has on Serum. I added the vocal line from Blade Runner to keep myself in mood for the track and kept it. Actually the vocals on the final mix aren’t from the BR, they are voice overs by Straplocked 🙂 At the time of composing the album i had a feeling that i don’t want to use normal synthwave drums for the tracks so i just browsed through my sample library and kept adding drum after drum without giving them too much thought.
Slickster: The last time we spoke you mentioned that most of your listeners are in the USA. Also, you just visited NYC and did the gig at St. Vitus. Has the demographic of your followers changed much or do you still get most of your traffic from the United States?
Turbo Knight: Not much, maybe 40%-50% of my listeners are from USA. England and bigger European countries come next. Finland has also gotten quite big synthwave country. Finnish people are like 4-5th on my most listened countries. Also a lot of new aspiring artists been coming out of Finland lately. We are slowly becoming a hotspot of new Synthwave artists 😉
Slickster: Overall, there is an openness to Navigators that feels refreshing. It says to me, “I’m Turbo Knight and I don’t need to prove myself to anyone. I can leave a lot of space in the music.” This really lets the album “breathe” for me and my ears don’t get tired as quickly. Does this ring true to you?
Turbo Knight: I have pretty sensitive ears myself so I usually try to to cut out more of the harsh frequencies and I really love spacy, flying sounds. It might also have something to do with my uncatholic way of mixing and doing rough cuts where ever i don’t feel fits the mood of the track 🙂
Slickster: Do you have plans to create a music video to accompany a track on Navigators?
Turbo Knight: I really haven’t thought of doing actual music video for any of the tracks but i’m going to upload whole album to my youtube with same art as the teasers of the album used. My graphical skills are almost nearing zero so it’s a no go for me at least for now.
Slickster: Who, in your opinion, is at the top of the synthwave genre right now in terms of creativity?
Turbo Knight: I really can’t name anyone who’s really at the top, i’m more like individual track listener, and trust me, I listen A LOOOOT of synthwave. But to mention few who I really like would be: Nightstop, Droid Bishop, Starcadian and so on. I really like the classic artists of the genre, the OG’s
Slickster: Where do you see the genre heading in 5 years? 10 years? Is this only a fad – one that will fade away – or will this 80’s inspired music continue to be relevant for a long time?
Turbo Knight: I think the genre will evolve to sound more like modern electronic music but with flavours from the 80s. It wouldn’t be synthwave without the retro feels? I think synthwave is here to stay, it’s really open genre for creating new sounds and trying out new stuff. One example of synthwave evolving is darksynth, which is slowly turning into a smaller brother of genres like dubstep and edm but still keeping it’s retrowave feel to it. At least i’m going to continue making this style music till i can’t do it anymore 🙂
Slickster: What’s your favorite part about Finland? What’s one thing you would change if you could?
Turbo Knight: Summer in Finland! Summer is special here because of the long and dark winter. Everything turns so green that it’s instant cure for your soul that catched the cold at the dark winter. There’s not much what i would change but if we got rid of fall i would be glad. I hate rain because i’m working outside. (Hello to all steel fixers out there!)
Slickster: Best of luck with Navigators and all of your promotion with the album. Is there anything you’d like to mention that we didn’t get to talk about in the interview?
Turbo Knight: Thanks mate! I wan’t to thanks everyone involved in the making of the album, you are great and know who you are! I also want to thank everyone at Megacorp for being supportive and listening to my mixes all over again for half a year. Thanks for the precious feedback! Also big thanks to my loving wife and my family for letting me do my music in our living room corner! 😀 Have a great summer everyone and stay rad and retro!
Official Turbo Knight Links
http://www.slickstermagazine.com/turbo-knight-synthwave/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIGyZEpogIK7b7RgHF6a2cQ