Kayo Dot Plastic House on Base of Sky

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. Kayo Dot has never made the same record twice. From chamber music to progressive black metal, from goth to jazz and avant­garde classical, Kayo Dot is experimental and often unclassifiable. Plastic House on Base of Sky is Kayo Dot’s 7th full­length since the bands inception in 2003 On Kayo Dot’s newest full length, Plastic House on Base of Sky, the band continues to embrace the electronic allusions found on their previous effort Coffins on Io. Plastic House on Base of Sky incorporates 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 forward­thinking experimentalism of Conrad Schnitzler or Morton Subotnick. This latest effort, a 40 minute­long, 5­song LP replaces the future­noir theme of Coffins on Io with an innovative, complex, 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 self­destructive, 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 post­human future­present.