DiN
5
Caged by Ian Boddy & Chris Carter
Limited to 1,000 copies
In their first collaboration, Ian Boddy and Chris Carter have created a
stunning panorama filled with the vast empty echoes of lost, imagined cities.
But don't think for a moment that this is merely a collection of anonymous,
ephemeral drifts and drones. Together they have produced a music of startling
muscularity which fuses their concerns with form, timbre and space, forging
a sound which appeals to the heart as much as the head.
Stripped back to the sparse essence of accessible dance-savvy electronica,
the pair have imbued the seven tracks on Caged with a dense undercurrent
of proto-dub which will thump you in the chest and rattle your window panes.
The sense of forward momentum quite literally carries the listener in a
fast-moving aural travelogue where breakbeats slip and slide across time
and space, tendrils of melody are twisted, subverted and converted into
a kind of digital morse where the flotsam and jetsam of ghost-notes are
swept in on a intense sonic tidal wave.
Caged plays around with chance and paradox - where a whisper becomes a crescendo,
a beat becomes a tone, where everything is transmuted and nothing stands
still.
They say expectation is a prison.
Abandon your expectations - being Caged is being free.
Boddy and Carter paint pictures of beautiful desolation on their new album
Caged. In their first collaboration, they've created a stunning panorama
filled with the vast empty echoes of lost, imagined cities. Catch a glimpse
of what might be there.
Ominous chimes murmur as wavelengths drift and merge. Signals like hammered
steel beaten at night, as lonely as morse frequencies slip transmuting
temple bell tones to clear light refracted transmissions out of time,
the twisting roar of forgotten highways, a place where the soundtracks
of long deserted arcades still play windblown fragments glimmering in
the twilight flotsam and jetsam of ghost-notes swept in on a intense tidal
wave of startling sonics pulsing neon shards of music caught in the sizzling
rain swept streets.
Book your trip to that other place now.
Sid Smith - Strategic Support
Review in the May 2000 edition of The Wire
On a cursory hearing you might misjudge this as an overscripted meeting
of two Old Skools - dub and industrial - where route logic trumps roots
friction. Give it gestation time, though, and the chthonic soundings of
these two old souls - Chris normally partners Cosey, Boddy has been doubling
himself for 13 years on his own DiN label ( not to be confused with the
Berlin imprint ) - repays your attention in shades. The grid may be linear,
but the mood is dank and windblown, flinty, waywardly British. Caged has
a verifiable personality - 'Under-Dub', as the aptly titled closer puts
it - where too much nu-skool dub just sounds like Lego-bit homage. B &
C's carefully plotted hyp(g)nosis bubbles with reticences, resonances,
lurches and larvae, it unearths moods beyond most modern plagiarists.
Catch the way the bassline comes in on the opener 'Concussed' - red sun
splitting grey clouds - seamlessly interlacing drift/tone and beaten tracks.
Subterranean drip and echo, percussion like midnight syntax tapped out
on pipes - an unnerving, claustrophobic soundtrack for that Harry Lime
moment when all your shadows catch up with you.
DiN
5