Electronic Savant Falling Islands Invites You Into A Cyberpunk Odyssey With His NETWLKR Saga

Enter the cyberpunk frontier of Falling Islands (Credit: Nicholas Deng, @dengnicholas [photo]; Unsplash [background])

Androids prowl the neon-lit streets hunting for their next bounty. Hovercars soar past the dog-eat-dog metropolis. A blastergun fight breaks out in a rusty crime-rife saloon. We can keep on painting pictures and tropes of a cyberpunk tale, but every connoisseur and dilettante knows that no cyberpunk fabrication is complete without a master ingredient – the soundtrack. If you’re searching for a local producer who gets the memo, you’d wanna lock your crosshairs on Falling Islands, an electronic savant who’s infatuated with the time-specific yet timeless genre.

To understand a machine, you have to peer inside its inner anatomy. Falling Islands began adoring electronic music from the prodigious age of 12, and that passion’s been projected onto his multiple aspects of life. More than an electronic producer and performer – whom you might’ve seen as a resident of cybergoth collective, BlackLight Tribe – Falling Islands is also an avid synthesist and Assistant Tutor at NUS Electronic Music Lab, an influential breeding ground for the electronic wunderkinds of tomorrow. Through his sweeping ambit of musically-inclined activities, Falling Islands has exponentially levelled up in his sound and it’s recently culminated in his cyberpunk odyssey titled NETWLKR.

Falling Islands is one of the core members of BlackLight Tribe (Credit: Brandon Koh, @sanfranciskoh)

Released at the tail-end of last year, NETWLKR heavily takes inspiration from the cyberpunk genre, emerging as a four-track EP that’s cinematic, expansive and brimming with storytelling. Much like science fiction, Falling Islands’ latest EP is packed with twists and turns, never sticking to one rigid style of sound. He sets the tone early on with “BAD CHIP”, applying ominous drones that foreshadows vistas of a wasteland. NETWLKR’s title track offers an industrial march with glitching circuitry, swollen bass runs and luminescent synths. “MANIFESTO” delivers a smouldering electro prologue before erupting out of its shell as a scorching synthwave cruiser. And “BLACK MARKET CYBERWARE” ventures into a futuristic discotheque, firing four-on-the-floor sentiments with an acid techno climax.

“The common underlying aesthetic, cinematic, and narrative thread of the EP is one that is undeniably cyberpunk in nature, evoking the many works of cyberpunk literature, film, video games, and media that we have come to know and love (and sometimes hate),” shares Falling Islands. “This is precisely what excites me about the ‘cyberpunk sound’ now; it really isn’t a fixed genre of music. Instead, any genre or any style could be adapted, reconfigured, and reprogrammed to fit the aesthetic ethos of it. That flexibility and malleability is something that is really fun for me.”

Falling Islands plans to eventually release *NETWLKR* via a limited run of CDs (Credit: Brandon Koh, @sanfranciskoh)

And because it’s a fantasy that can be built on layer after layer like a Night City megabuilding, Falling Islands didn’t stop his NETWLKR momentum with just one EP. Instead he leapt at the opportunity to showcase like-minded friends and talents in the scene, inviting them to reinterpret his productions via a remix EP called NETWLKR REWiRED, much like an expansion pack. It’s in REWiRED where you’ll find an IDM edit of “BAD CHIP” by Bokeh Fields, constantly morphing between gritty melodic techno and serene beat-free respites. It’s where Kios Nil drops a post-apocalyptic neurobass rework of “NETWLKR”, and vylt turns “MANIFESTO” into a synth metal rock opera with gnarly distorted guitars. It even features darksynth mad scientist Microchip Terror, who amplifies the closer with vehement and destructive intent, including guttural virtual growls like a murderous AI trying to break free.

The NETWLKR chronicles of Falling Islands are steel-coated, synth-throated experiments that see the producer pushing the definition of cyberpunk musicology to the edge. And like the boundary of sci-fi itself, there’s no limit to where the rise of Falling Islands can go.