Kayo Dot

Kayo Dot

Hubardo

Flenser

Finally back in print, the seventh studio album by the veteran avant-garde band Kayo Dot. Meaning “lantern” or “lamp” in the Enochian language of 16th century magicians John Dee and Edward Kelley, Hubardo follows the epic and heartbreaking narrative of a meteor falling to earth and the alchemical transformation of a lonely poet observer. This album displays aspects of the band’s many forms, even moments that hark back to the act’s former identity, Maudlin of the Well (including an appearance by MOTW vocalist Jason Byron). It is a dizzying trip through genres and moods that blossoms in wild directions, an out-of-control chemical reaction. From beautiful post-rock passages and demented ballads to tripped-out 70s prog fusion, jazz and black metal, Hubardo masterfully incorporates just about every style imaginable during its nearly 100 minute run time. “After a decade of trying to live up to the precedent set by their debut, Kayo Dot has finally reached – and surpassed – the level of not only themselves, but of everyone else within their realm of music.” —Bearded Gentlemen Music

Kayo Dot

Plastic House On Base Of Sky

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…dead satellites, trashed space stations, wasted old lady heroin addicts hanging…  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 avant-garde classical, Kayo Dot is experimental and often unclassifiable. Plastic House on Base of Sky is Kayo Dot’s 7th full-length 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 forward-thinking experimentalism of Conrad Schnitzler or Morton Subotnick. This latest effort, a 40 minute-long, 5-song LP replaces the future-noir 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 self-destructive, either...

Kayo Dot

Coffins On Io

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Led by founding member Toby Driver (Secret Chiefs 3), Kayo Dot emerged in 2002 from the ashes of Boston, MA, metal group Maudlin of the Well. Since then, Driver has led Kayo Dot through lineup changes and stylistic shifts: from traditional metal, to atmospheric, avant-garde metal; and now with their new album Coffins on Io, to the bats-in-your-belfry hard rock of Sisters of Mercy intersecting with Peter Gabriel-era Genesis, Scritti Politti and early Roxy Music. In 2013, Kayo Dot released their critically acclaimed conceptual double-album Hubardo. Undeniably experimental, but largely unclassifiable, it received rave reviews: SputnikMusic ranked it among the best of 2013, and Cvlt Nation called it, “mesmerizing avant-garde blackened doom,” and a “towering achievement.” But Kayo Dot’s evolution is governed by an inscrutable inner-logic. Accessible songwriting on Coffins on Io and an emphasis on vocal melody and electronic percussion makes the record’s darkness and intensity familiar and relatable. For example: the dark wave of “Offramp Cycle, Pattern 22” might be unrecognizable to Kayo Dot’s metal fans. “The sound is kind of like a sexy combination of Type O Negative, Peter Gabriel, Sisters of Mercy,” Driver says. But the track also encompasses the brooding menace of classic Bauhaus as well as current dark wavers Cold Cave and Crystal Stilts: artists young and old who live and die in those unknowable corners where heaviness meets delicacy and sincerity meets theatricality. Driver’s penchant for prog rock surfaces in the ethereal “Spirit Photography,” complete with a saxophone melody line—strikingly gentle when compared...