Some records end with a bow. Arcana ends with a confrontation. Shook’s Omega is a nine-minute build into what the Dutch producer Jasper Wijnands calls the final vortex of the giant mega structures waiting in the dark abyss of space and time. Sequencers led by ancient technology with a demonic spirit give way to dark, hand-played, layered sawtooth oscillators. If you have been following the Arcana singles, this is the last room on the map.
Wijnands records as Shook, and the project has always sat between memory and the future. He draws from 70s and early 80s synth-pop, disco and funk, then bends that history toward anime and futuristic soundtracks. Classical training sits under Asian and Western roots. A youth spent digging through record shops still shows up in the way a groove is allowed to breathe before the machines take over. More than a decade in, the catalog moves freely between synthesizer funk, city pop and ambient, and dancefloor-friendly electro and nu-disco. Omega is tagged electro, synthwave and nu-disco, and it uses all three without turning them into a costume.
The track is long on purpose. Nine minutes is not a radio edit; it is a structure. The sequencers carry the early pressure, old technology with a mean streak, while the later stretch dissolves into those hand-played sawtooth layers. That hand-played detail matters in a year when a lot of synthwave is assembled from presets and prompts. Shook’s earlier Arcana single Ultra Magnetic was built on vintage analogue gear in the studio, and Omega stays in that same tactile world. The images he names are specific: Akira, Ninja Scroll, the worlds of Katsuhiro Otomo and Susumu Yokota. You can hear why. Otomo’s cities are vast, mechanical and slightly cursed. Yokota’s electronics often felt like memory leaking through a machine. Omega borrows that scale without quoting either one.
Arcana is a sci-fi concept album, eight tracks on Epicenter (EPI021), set for worldwide release on 30 October 2026. Limited vinyl is already up for pre-order on Bandcamp. The running order places Omega as the closer after Proxima, the title track, In The Quiet, Space Rock Funk and the rest of the voyage. Earlier singles have been framed as space rock funk: electro-funk with a Homework-era gleam, Den Haag electro roots, and a visual pull toward 90s anime directors including Otomo, Satoshi Kon and Yoshiaki Kawajiri. Omega is the point where that voyage stops sightseeing and meets the structure.
The résumé around the music is unusually concrete. Shook has collaborated with Legowelt, the Den Haag electronic pioneer, and with Shinichiro Yokota of the Japanese house underground. Hideki Matsutake, also known as Logic System of Yellow Magic Orchestra, has spoken about his work. The track Always became a personal anthem for astronaut Christina Koch, who played it to her husband from the International Space Station during her record-breaking mission. She has since flown around the Moon as part of NASA’s Artemis II. Milestones has also turned up on Netflix’s Better Call Saul. None of that is required to hear Omega, but it explains the scale. This is a producer already used to music leaving the room it was made in.
Electro and synthwave are crowded right now, and a lot of the loudest records chase a short hook and a neon thumbnail. Nu-disco often does the same with a tighter bassline and a brighter chorus. Omega goes the other way. It trusts a long build, a dark palette, and oscillators that sound played rather than pasted. That is a useful counterweight if you like the genre’s history more than its mood-board version: YMO’s curiosity, early electro’s machines, city-pop gloss used as atmosphere instead of costume.
Arcana lands worldwide on 30 October, with the limited vinyl pre-order already live on Shook’s Bandcamp. If you want the confrontation at full length, Omega is the door.
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What do you think of a nine-minute closer versus a tight single edit? Drop it in the comments.
