Hometown: north London.
The lineup: Alvin Lee Ryan and Tony Russell.
The background: KAS-tro are excellent purveyors of dark, experimental electronic music. Just knowing that their five-track Self Tilted EP was mastered by Mandy Parnell, who has been at the controls in some form for Aphex Twin, Brian Eno, Björk, LCD Soundsystem and Junior Boys, should give you some idea of the glitchy but glistening, cut-up, cold and hard sonics on offer. That they have worked with ambient noir type the Haxan Cloak (for whom one half of KAS-tro, Alvin Lee Ryan, plays drums), Warp electronicist Clark and grime producer Darq E Freaker should provide further clues. They have a shared love of J Dilla, Arca, Autechre, Flying Lotus and Morton Subotnick and are “mutually obsessed” with early 20th-century electronic music, musique concrete and hip-hop. Jake Bugg fans should probably alight here.
KAS-tro are serious students of extreme, richly detailed, haunting yet hard-hitting slow-motion electronica. Alvin Lee Ryan has an master’s in electroacoustic composition and his KAS-tro partner Tony Russell, AKA Tony Castro III, has studied music production. They first met at an east London music school that Russell runs for a music charity. Party starters they are not: the pair use music “as a tool to communicate and rehabilitate”; they have worked together with inmates at different category prisons, recently arrived refugees, kids excluded from mainstream education and people living in deprived areas. For one recent project, they teamed up with a group of young offenders to turn a shipping container into an immersive audiovisual installation, featuring recorded orchestral instruments and found sounds.
That’s not to say that their music is inaccessible, cerebral and uninvolving, more to be admired than enjoyed. The instrumental title track of Self Tilted has depth-charge beats, shards of witch house keyboards, startling FX and the creepy momentum of a horror movie theme. With its big beat and shuddering bass, Luzon is dance music for zombies – ghouls aloud. D’oro has enough textures and timbres to test your speakers to the limit. Sirens of Titan might not feature a tune as such, but there is dazzlement of a different kind thanks to the craft and precision of this thrilling montage of harsh, shrill sounds and rhythmic judder – not to mention the stereo panning, which alone deserves a medal. Sir George Martin would be proud.
The buzz: “Bedroomy electro-hop that swagger(s) with character.”
The truth: Left alone in the studio you’d imagine they’d Fidel till Rome burns. (Fidel! Geddit?)
Most likely to: Take your brain to another dimension.
Least likely to: Become the revolutionary leader of Cuba.
What to buy: The Self Tilted EP is released by Kastro’s Kitchen on 28 March.
File next to: Clark, the Haxan Cloak, Arca, Flying Lotus.
Links: Kas-tro on Soundcloud.
Ones to watch: Beatrix Players, Anohni, Shel, Rabbi Shergill, Iska Dhaaf.
