Kayo Dot: Any friends or foes?

[Scrotum Scissor]

Toby sang through a Kazoo to capture that particular sound.

I believe he also does that on the studio version of "The Manifold Curiosity" (first vocal section a couple of minutes into the song), or through a paper-wrapped comb.

Kazoos open a whole new industry for the unfathomably immaculate and effervescent Prog. From 'tron to 'zoo.

[battema]

I believe he also does that on the studio version of "The Manifold Curiosity" (first vocal section a couple of minutes into the song), or thorugh a paper-wrapped comb.

Kazoos open a whole new industry for the unfathomably immaculate and effervescent Prog. From 'tron to 'zoo.

It could've been a paper comb as well...my memory is rather fuzzy from that particular evening (it was super late and I was super tired). I just remember being absolutely floored by the energy of it all.

Dowsing is a weird one for me...I like it, but saw the band live about a week prior to its release. And the onstage renditions of the songs were so monstrous, the CD has always felt "lesser" by comparison. That's just a perception thing though.

[Scrotum Scissor]

And the onstage renditions of the songs were so monstrous, the CD has always felt "lesser" by comparison.

It was the first one I got, and I gave it my lonesome listening debut while licking sun and sky to bottles of cheap champagne tempered in low flood at this place here during July 2006:

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I listened to it through a CD blaster and remember diving into the sea as the "Tripod" went off, casting echoes of sonic bliss towards the bentwave, with "Immortelle and Paper Caravelle" running as I reemerged to shore, rendering a delicious yet eerie calm and subtlety to my erstwhile existential ponderings of the moment. I got very caught up in that album after this, and reimagined said experience when enduring a week of coma after surviving a near-drowning later that summer on the other side of the island.

[battema]

Wow...that is some exceptional context. Thanks for sharing!

[100423]

But the obtuse "straightness" of*Coffins didn't really sit all too well with them...

I have to say I dig Coffin On Io and it's “obtuse straightness”. I get a quasi-'80s gothic vibe off most of the album which is appealing to me when I'm in that sort of mood. I don't have Gamma Knife, so I need to check it out at some point, but my favorites of the ones I do have are Coyote, Blue Lambency Downward, and Stained Glass.

It was the first one I got, and I gave it my lonesome listening debut while licking sun and sky to bottles of cheap champagne tempered in low flood at this place here during July 2006...

That sounds pretty intense and would definitely enhance the imprinting of the album in your brain.

[Lebofsky]

I highly recommend having Toby be in charge of the playlist during long drives in the tour van.

- Matt

[Baribrotzer]

I highly recommend having Toby be in charge of the playlist during long drives in the tour van.

- Matt

He seems like someone who would be good for that - his influences are very wide indeed, which suggests equally wide tastes, an all-over-the-place music collection, and the ability to call up and play lots of fantastic stuff you've never heard before.

[Spiral]

Maudlin at large don't do it for me...too typical or something

I never thought I'd see the day when someone would use that particular adjective. maulin could be many things, but typical they definitely were not.

[mnprogger]

I never thought I'd see the day when someone would use that particular adjective. maulin could be many things, but typical they definitely were not.

agreed. They were very much ahead of their time to me. How many metal bands (progressive or otherwise) have used Chamber instruments like them?

And Toby used to compose music from the experience of waking up with a guitar beside his bed. I question many if any other accounts of that have ever been documented.

[Scrotum Scissor]

Toby used to compose music from the experience of waking up with a guitar beside his bed. I question many if any other accounts of that have ever been documented.

I believe I once read that this was how he started connecting with the teachings of Lateef (his autophysiopsychic modes of conceiving sound); catching, Processing and regenerating impressions of the 'dreamworld'.

[Haruspex Carnage]

I never thought I'd see the day when someone would use that particular adjective. maulin could be many things, but typical they definitely were not.

Shrug. Outside of the latest one, they never held my attention? Maybe that was the wrong word, they just don't do it for me.

[ytserush]

100% agree. They have made some of the most exciting and genuinely progressive rock music I've encountered these past 10-15 years, and they're probably one of the bands to whom I've listened the most. But the obtuse "straightness" of Coffins didn't really sit all too well with them, IMHO. I guess one could still praise them for constantly insisting on trying new things, which of course again keeps listeners on their toes as to what comes next; an all-acoustic album, maybe - or an album merely containing short tunes etc. To me the Driver/Matsumiya/Kayo complex constitutes a progressive rock equivalent to Gira/Jarboe/Swans elsewhere.

Deep, existential and fundamentally transcendent music. Hubardo in particular is a groundbreaking mammoth work, but my absolute faves are still Coyote, Choirs of the Eye and Blue Lambency.

i only have blue Lambency which I like well enough. Sound like I should put these on that insanely long list.

[mnprogger]

not that I'm all giddy about this (I'm way more intrigued by the concept album Greg Massi has been working on for Baliset, which may not come out for a number of years), but some probably may be:

https://www.facebook.com/FlenserReco...type=3&theater

[unclemeat]

KAYO DOT : ‘PLASTIC HOUSE ON BASE OF SKY’
New LP out June 24 on The Flenser

"a refined, and sensual, post-new wave tour de force" - Echoes & Dust
“…a hypnotic blend of sensuous grooves, ghostly heaviness and knotty melodies ..." - Time Out New York

Kayo Dot has never made the same record twice. From chamber music to progressive black metal, from goth to jazz and avant-garde classical, Kayo Dot is undeniably experimental and utterly unclassifiable. Since its inception in 2003, the band has released seven full-length albums, including their debut Choirs of the Eye (2003), the conceptual double-album Hubardo (2013) and most recently Coffins on Io (2014, The Flenser). Kayo Dot have toured the globe numerous times over and have played the stages of Roadburn, SXSW, and many other international music festivals. In 2015, frontman Toby Driver organized and played a 12-concert retrospective at The Stone in NYC. Now, Kayo Dot is gearing up for the release of a new LP: Plastic House on Base of Sky, due out June 24th, 2016 from The Flenser.

On Plastic House on Base of Sky, Kayo Dot fully embraces Coffins on Io's electronic allusions, incorporating a variety of synthesizers (many of them vintage analog) to create another work of ambition and magnitude that fuses the explosive musical imagination of a band like Magma with the forward-thinking experimentalism of Conrad Schnitzler or Morton Subotnick. This 40 minute-long, 5-song LP goes beyond the future-noir theme of Coffins on Io and is an innovative and biomechanical work of art. Think seemingly impossible architecture, dead satellites, trashed space stations, wasted old lady heroin addicts hanging out by cheap motel pools, broken people, and a hopeless dead and polluted world transitioning into artifice and mechanism and reacting by being self-destructive, either to the point of utter obliteration or a glorious transhuman condition.

Toby Driver, the primary composer and bandleader of Kayo Dot, has been fiercely productive over the years, and while that usually refers to how many songs or albums an artist has made, with Driver the productivity is in the realm of ideas as much as music itself. In the course of a single Kayo Dot song, the amount of risks and liberties taken with form and convention usually outnumbers what other artists cover in a full album. For as much ground as they cover, it's always in the service of a carefully curated mood and this is apparent on Plastic House on Base of Sky's exploration of our mechanical post-human future-present.

The core of Kayo Dot might be that mood– one that lies at the crossroads of darkness and mystery. In film, music that accompanies mystery is often nocturnal, playing on a primal relation in our brains between the unknown and the night. It's this intersection that is the essence of Kayo Dot. Driver, who recorded Plastic House on Base of Sky in various locations from August 2014 to December 2015, again collaborates with lyricist Jason Byron. Byron, a lifelong student of the occult, gives the listener a feast of words to unpack that are as elusively satisfying as the labyrinths of sound they travel through. Whether by way of menacing guitars, ethereal woodwinds, or aggressive electronics, there's always a sense that a new passage could open, that around the next corner could be anything.

Song premieres, pre-orders and more info on Plastic House on Base of Sky coming soon from Kayo Dot and The Flenser.

Cover art by Fuco Ueda. Design by Kevin Gan Yuen.

Plastic House on Base of Sky Track Listing:

1. Amalia's Theme
2. All The Pain in All the Wide World
3. Magnetism
4. Rings of Earth
5. Brittle Urchin

[battema]

I'll definitely want to hear this first...as much as I've enjoyed Kayo Dot's output, the description for Coffins on Io and my actual enjoyment of the material ended up being pretty far apart from one another.

[Lebofsky]

Honestly I think Coffins on Io is one of the best records by anybody in the past few years. Just to help balance out what seems to be a general opinion around here.

- Matt

[100423]

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[tallliman]

A new album is an autobuy for me. Coffins... always appears to be over too quickly for me. Possibly a good sign, need to revisit it again but it almost feels accessible in a way much of the earlier stuff doesn't (to me at least).

[Scrotum Scissor]

Honestly I think Coffins on Io is one of the best records by anybody in the past few years. Just to help balance out what seems to be a general opinion around here.

I'll be listening to Coffins over Lagavulin this upcoming Saturday, Matt. It deserves some more chances, and I want to check it in before apprehending this new one - which I would have gotten all the same.

[unclemeat]

The new album Plastic House On Base Of Sky is now available for pre-order :
http://nowflensing.com/

[battema]

First track is up for a listen: http://www.tinymixtapes.com/chocolat...-dot-magnetism

I'm liking it...looks like I'm in for a copy

[Baribrotzer]

First track is up for a listen: http://www.tinymixtapes.com/chocolat...-dot-magnetism

I'm liking it...looks like I'm in for a copy

Good stuff. Definitely a continuation in the direction of Coffins on Io, but more ambitious and developed. Very little metal, lots of New Wave, but prog at its heart. Wonder who's in the band - is it just Toby plus Keith Abrams on drums, or all four or five of them.

[Haruspex Carnage]

Good stuff. Definitely a continuation in the direction of Coffins on Io, but more ambitious and developed. Very little metal, lots of New Wave, but prog at its heart. Wonder who's in the band - is it just Toby plus Keith Abrams on drums, or all four or five of them.

Yep, sounds like the drums were recorded better too on this one so far.

[Morpheus]

Didn't care much for that, the retro thing just doesn't do anything for me.

[Morpheus]

Another new track

http://www.avclub.com/article/kayo-d...s-theme-237924

I don't like this one at all, I may pass on this album.