Kas-Tro

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 ... [ more ]