The man behind it is Markku Ruottinen, Helsinki-based DIY producer and sole proprietor of Neighbourhood Tower. This is no overnight arrival. The project began around 2018, when Ruottinen started sifting through demos he had written at the electric piano. The three-song *Talking Wind* EP followed in 2019. Lockdown in 2020 gave him the hours to hole up and tinker, producing the single "A Wave of It All." Then came the five-track *Terror & Silence* in April 2021, and a steady drip of singles: "A Different Kind of Light" in 2022, "Irresistible Party Zone" and "Crossing Time" in 2023. It is a patient, bedroom-studio apprenticeship, and *Channeling Darkness* sounds like its graduation ceremony.

All ten tracks were written, played and produced by Ruottinen alone, and Pekka Tuomi has given the lot a gleaming, tasteful master. Ruottinen cheerfully calls it his AOR record "with a more limited production budget." That modesty is the only misleading thing about it. Limited budgets have always been the mother of invention, and here the shortfall has been converted into character: a wooziness at the edges, a handmade shimmer, the feeling of someone building a cathedral out of bedroom furniture.

The ancestry is plain, and Ruottinen wears it without apology. The late-70s Alan Parsons Project lives in the polished, faintly mournful sweep of the arrangements, and E.L.O. in the way a melody climbs and then gazes down from a great height. Among the modern cousins, The War on Drugs supplies the open-highway chug, Future Islands the aching romanticism, and the Flaming Lips a streak of wonky cosmic wonder. Krautrock's metronomic pulse and shoegaze's soft-focus fog hum beneath it all. These are less influences than a well-stocked record shelf, and Ruottinen has rifled through it with real discernment.

The title track is the heart of the thing, and "Soul of a Radio" is its twin. The album grew around those two songs, and the gravity shows: both pull the surrounding material into orbit. "Stranger in a Strange Land," the January 2025 single that quietly gathered its audience on Spotify and SoundCloud, opens the record and remains a dazzling calling card, a song about displacement that sounds at home anywhere. Further in, "Distance" and "Outer Skies" stretch into the kind of pillowy, star-gazing reverie that turns a long night drive into a pilgrimage. "Soft Bullets" might serve as the album's manifesto: it hits you, and somehow it doesn't hurt.

What lifts the record above homage is its emotional temperature. "One Last Time," "Nothing Comes Easy" and "No Expectations" sketch a mind wrestling its own shadows, yet the music keeps nudging towards daylight. The parenthesis in the title is no gimmick. Gloom and glow are in constant negotiation, and the glow wins on points. Even "Parts of Me," written in the final sprint of early 2026, sounds unhurried, as though it had been waiting in the wings all along.

Ruottinen has delivered something rare: a debut album that arrives after years of EPs and singles yet sounds neither tired nor hurried, nostalgic without being stuck in the past. Pour yourself a glass of something red, dim the lights and let the transmission come through. New music is promised for 2027, and after this, the wait feels bearable. Somewhere in Helsinki, a small tower is broadcasting, and it is well worth tuning in.