Balinese palms bow under the weight of invisible waves. Frangipani exudes a fragrance impossible to convey through speakers, yet its equivalent can be recreated—a sonic perfume of oscillators and sequencers. Dmitrii Riabokon, working under the pseudonym ØRBITA, offers the listener a ticket to an island where geography dissolves into a state of synthesized abstraction.

Gravity—the project’s debut album—exists in the space between the documentary precision of eighties electronic music and the fantasy of what this aesthetic could have become had it gained access to the technologies of subsequent decades.

Riabokon openly admits he always wanted to “blend synthwave’s nostalgic warmth with raw.” His references—Tycho, Moderat, the entire canon of ambient techno that grew from the ruins of the Berlin Wall and Californian studios—are all traceable to the naked eye. His ØRBITA project is an attempt to materialize youthful dreams of a sound that seemed futuristic thirty years ago. The paradox of retro-futurism lies in the fact that the future we imagined always remains in the past. ØRBITA works with this paradox consciously: synthesizers here sound simultaneously vintage and contemporary, drums pulse with the heartbeat of an android, and the album’s cosmic theme becomes a metaphor for a journey through layers of cultural memory.

The album’s nine tracks are constructed as a narrative of exploring an unknown planet—a conceptual framework that might seem naive if Riabokon treated it literally. Instead, he uses cosmic imagery as a way of organizing sonic material, where each track represents a separate location in an imaginary universe. The geography of this world consists of analog filters, reverb, and delays, creating the illusion of a space that exists only in headphones.

“Arrival“ begins the journey with monumentality that recalls times when synthesizers were perceived as instruments of serious, almost symphonic music. Pulsating basses reference the golden age of synth cinema—Carpenter, Vangelis, Tangerine Dream. Riabokon consciously avoids acoustic elements: everything here is honestly electronic, devoid of attempts to masquerade as “live” instruments. This is the music of invasion—when a spaceship touches the surface and reality changes its parameters.

The transition to “Prism“ blurs the monumentality of the previous track, replacing it with air. Here the evolution of sound is already audible: there are the massive synthesizer constructions of the eighties and the more rarefied aesthetic of nineties ambient techno. Shimmering textures create the effect of multiple refraction—light passes through a prism and breaks into components. High-frequency shimmers add a dimension of mystery, as if Riabokon is opening a door to a space where physical laws obey different rules. The bass line recedes to the background, ceases to dominate, transforms into a foundation for more exquisite sonic architectures. The landing moment is complete—now exploration begins.

The title track “Gravity“ justifies its name through a gradual increase in sound density. Here Riabokon experiments with textural complexity: acoustic details—rustling resembling the movement of foliage, distant bird voices—interweave with electronic chords, creating a hybrid ecosystem. Melody dissolves in this environment, ceases to be the composition’s center, transforms into one of many sound elements. Gravity here is a metaphor for attraction between opposites: organic and synthetic, chaos and structure, past and future.

“Dusk“ transfers the action to a temperature zone where metal freezes and electronics become tactile. Gliding sounds here work as a synesthetic equivalent of touching an icy surface. Riabokon returns to the slow pulsating disco rhythm of the eighties. Twilight in his reading is a moment of transition, when light dims, temperature drops, and reality acquires a metallic sheen. Synthesizers here become almost physical objects: one can imagine how their waves roll in like ocean onto shore, each successive one slightly colder than the previous.

“Rubicon“ slows the tempo even further, stretching melody to a state of meditation. Here the influence of the ambient tradition manifests: music ceases to be active, transforms into an atmosphere in which you exist rather than listen to. The multicolored lights of nineties disco aesthetics flicker somewhere in the background but are stripped of their original energy. The high solo appearing in the track’s second half hovers above the bass line like a cloud above the horizon—visible but unattainable.

By the time of “Home“, the listener has already passed through all stages of space travel: landing, exploration, discovery of gravity, encounter with the cold of twilight, crossing the rubicon. The final track returns to the earthly dimension—an optimistic disco where major tonality works and hints at a return to familiar reality. Riabokon consciously simplifies the composition: here the internal conflict of previous tracks is almost absent, instruments exist in harmony, each occupying its place in the mix. This is techno without ambitions, without the desire to reinvent the genre—simply a competently constructed dancefloor track where melody plays the role of a beacon.

The Verdict

Gravity exists in the space of cultural retrospectivism, where music’s value is measured not by novelty but by the precision of executing the declared aesthetic. Riabokon chose a difficult task: to recreate the sound of the eighties using modern production means while avoiding direct copying.

The cosmic theme here works as a conceptual framework organizing sonic material, but it also becomes a limitation. Nine tracks follow the logic of the journey too literally: from arrival to return, from monumentality to optimism. This narrative linearity deprives the album of surprises—the listener always knows in which direction the music is moving. Riabokon demonstrates mastery of the synthesizer palette, understanding of dynamics and texture, the ability to create convincing sonic landscapes. At the same time, his compositions remain within genre conventions: there are no moments that would force one to reconsider understanding of what synthesizer music can be in the twenty-first century.

The album addresses an audience for whom the eighties exist as a cultural myth—a period of technological optimism, when the future seemed unambiguously beautiful and synthesizers sounded like instruments of that future. ØRBITA proposes returning to this imaginary past, where space was the territory of dreams and disco was the universal language of joy. For the listener seeking comfort in familiar sounds, Gravity fulfills its function impeccably. And know that this is perhaps its main achievement and its limitation. Gravity is an album about the weight of cultural memory, about the pull of the past that keeps us in orbit around familiar sounds. The question is whether we want to break free from this orbit or comfortably remain within its boundaries. ØRBITA made a choice in favor of the latter—and accomplished this task with rare professionalism.

*This review was made possible by SubmitHub