Silvia kastel
Silvia released Air Lows in January this year. Kastel has explored the outer limits and inner workings of no wave, industrial, dub, extreme electronics, free rock and improvisation. Air Lows - which follows the cassette releases Love Tape (2011), Voice Studies 20 (2015) and The Gap (2016) - is both her fullest and most refined offering to date, a work of vivid, isolationist electronics which draws deeply on her past experience but assuredly breaks new ground.
Prompted by a late-flowering interest in techno and club music, Kastel sought to create something which combines a steady rhythmic pulse with the otherworldly sonorities of musique concrete, and avant-garde synth sounds inspired by Japanese minimalism and techno-pop (Haruomi Hosono’s Philharmony being a particular favourite). The formal artifice of muzak / elevator music, the intros and outros of generic popular songs, the extreme light-heavy contrasts of jungle, the creative sampling of hardcore, and the very “human” synths in the jazz of Herbie Hancock’s Sextant and Sun Ra: all these things were touchstones for Air Lows’ conception and composition. All strains of music addressing - and complicating - the relationship between the human and the technological. By extension, visual inspirations also proved important: anime, and the avant-garde fashion of Rei Kawakubo. What does that shirt or dress sound like?
Her bookings include: Sonar Rekyjavik, London Contemporary Orchestra with Actress, Synthposium in Moscow, or Resident Advisor Berlin party. As a DJ: warming up for DJ Stingray in Ohm, playing at De School in Amsterdam, Säule/Berghain in Berlin. She's also busy with her radio show - Ultramarine Transmissions.
Prompted by a late-flowering interest in techno and club music, Kastel sought to create something which combines a steady rhythmic pulse with the otherworldly sonorities of musique concrete, and avant-garde synth sounds inspired by Japanese minimalism and techno-pop (Haruomi Hosono’s Philharmony being a particular favourite). The formal artifice of muzak / elevator music, the intros and outros of generic popular songs, the extreme light-heavy contrasts of jungle, the creative sampling of hardcore, and the very “human” synths in the jazz of Herbie Hancock’s Sextant and Sun Ra: all these things were touchstones for Air Lows’ conception and composition. All strains of music addressing - and complicating - the relationship between the human and the technological. By extension, visual inspirations also proved important: anime, and the avant-garde fashion of Rei Kawakubo. What does that shirt or dress sound like?
Her bookings include: Sonar Rekyjavik, London Contemporary Orchestra with Actress, Synthposium in Moscow, or Resident Advisor Berlin party. As a DJ: warming up for DJ Stingray in Ohm, playing at De School in Amsterdam, Säule/Berghain in Berlin. She's also busy with her radio show - Ultramarine Transmissions.