Label: CEE Format: CD
Caste collects together five years’ worth of guitar-based noise sculpture from Colin Bradley and Julian Coope, both once involved with the intriguingly angular Spleen. Their work as Dual is densely textured, layering spluttering gushes of string-wrenched gasps into feedback drones the like of which haven’t been properly explored in this guise since Main went further into the digital relams of CD-R mixing and live laptop processing. That Isolationist sense of marking the outer reaches of possibility for extracting noise from the guitar is here fully intact, with the pervading sense of dread cold and existential wonder which the genre invoked inherent to the core Caste‘s six tracks – arranged into one long piece over the CD to suit the miasmic mood.
The organic feel to the sounds is amplified by the progressive dissolution of a note into a warm drone, or a sub-bass undertow melted beneath a frisson of volume-controlled feedback – with percussive interjections making a large space for the whole to reverberate, reaching cruise-speed during the peaking pulsebeat of “Crain”. When a plucked string or brushed metallic strike crops up, its intentions can only be omminous, though a headlong dive into the mix reveals depths of Modernist machinations at the music’s heart. Caste requires attention for a proper experience of its overtones and harmonics to get the most from the rise and collapse of each segment of granularity; the darkroom ambience could easily be terrifying, in the way that natural phenomena can be, as levels are increased and polyrhythms (percussive or textural) interlocked to panic-button stages of near-oppressive intensity. Sometimes it even becomes hard to breathe.
With titles to match the abstraction or laterally-referred implications of their music – “Chpst:k”, “Wirm”, “Blicks” – each piece edges from the dust of its predecessor, and more conventionally descriptive names would perhaps lessened the impact of the whole. “Isochemic” is the most evocative of certain brain-states, closing the album in a drifting iceberg rumble and the hum of electrics left out to weather in acoustic residue. Not one for the impatient listener, Castemakes for some challenging listening, and deserves playing at the loudest volumes for the fullest stretching of any nearby double glazing too.
-Antron S. Meister-
