Bestiario is Mexian-born Vienna-based musician Angélica Castelló’s debut, a complex melange of samples, field recording, electronics and processing abstractly representing various influences and finures in the artists life. Outside here Castelló plays the ‘Paetzold subgreatbass recorder’ and performs in a number of groups with Viennese improv types including Burkhard Stangl among others, but inside it’s like viewing Castello’s thoughts and memories, noticeable events flitting past as blood, documented by a near-ceaseless flow of fluff and fizz, carries it forward.
‘Tombeau’ opens things with said crackle, faint, which amplifies to reveal its source in the frenzied buzzing of flies. Over this sustained triangle tones shimmer and lone guitar patterns ping, as the flies retreat, replaced by loud, gruff patches of static. ‘Ksenia’ is marked by the manic babbling of granular synthesis, through which chimes, industrial reverberations, and fragments of a gospel choir emerge. ‘Lima’ meanwhile is closer to the disintegrated orchestras of Indignant Senility, but smeared into grainy, looped swells recalls the epic constructions of gas. This combination of scratchy low-fi squall and grandiose classical articulations, like Ghedalia Tazartes meeting Ekkehard Ehlers, makes Bestiario a unique and rewarding album.
Joshua Meggitt
