The first words spoken on Air Lows are a firm suggestion: “Lay back.” Silvia Kastel’s tone is that of a knowledgeable overseer at a DIY hallucinogen ceremony. Her advice pans back and forth across the track while the cosmic instrumental suggests a funny person jumping around on the moon, alone with their thoughts. It’s an oddly whimsical introduction to a genuinely grave experimental electronic album full of anhedonic synths and moody sound effects. Her fifth full-length Air Lows feels like a goth psychedelic ritual intended to plumb the depths of the listener’s unconscious; while the record doesn’t always hit its mark, the moments that do sustain momentum radiate a delectably gnostic hum.
Much of Kastel’s previous output, both solo and as a founding member of the Italian duo Control Unit, has been influenced by ’70s and ’80s sounds of no wave and industrial music. Along these lines, her work often deals with themes of existential angst and depressive catharsis. She returns to this approach on Air Lows, but opens up her sound by incorporating motifs from club music for the first time—a move possibly influenced by her current home in Berlin. Kastel nurtures a more electrifying kind of machine energy by lacing her tracks with spectral techno beats stretched out in slow-mo. It becomes full-on body music when she discharges slabs of murky sub-bass that drag like an anvil across concrete. The effect is intensely visceral and immediately evocative of strains of sonic dread developed within jungle and UK dubstep.
Spindly, high-pitched synth gestures connect Kastel’s jumpy drum patterns and her gut-shifting low-end. They have an almost alchemical influence on the inner ear, their timbres alight with pleasantly grating resonance. It’s these passages, in combination with Kastel’s eerie vocal murmurations, that give the record its occult, para-spiritual feel. On the first half of Air Lows, these elements are implemented in a “song”-like format that feels a little too overdetermined by formal constraints. It’s on the album’s second half, which is more like a loosely defined four-part movement, that they really sync up with one another. The sonic palette forms its own ecology of sound, mutating and germinating in combusting feedback loops. “Heart 2 Tape” etches out a creepy form of dreamy decadence, while on “Spiderwebs” and “Concrete Void” Kastel pairs unwavering emotional intensity with dispassionate remove.
Much contemporary music that draws upon the canon of industrial and dark ambient ends up sounding like unimaginative Tumblr mood-boarding, or a flimsy attempt at LARPing bygone scenes. Kastel mostly avoids these pitfalls, though, and it’s clear that Air Lows is something a little more singular. Deciphering the lyrical content of her alternately sung and spoken passages can be hard, but one audible turn of phrase in “Spiderwebs” is a good index for the record’s ethos: “It’s the poetry of nothing/Concrete void.” Kastel’s previous solo release was called The Gap, and her fascination with hardcore negativity pervades the general spirit of Air Lows. Exactly what this negativity is supposed to do is left ambiguous—it’s positioned more like an abstract emotional compass than anything remotely resembling a coherent ideological stance.
The record’s central feeling tends to diffuse—in the moments when you’re not paying attention—through small adjustments in ambiance and mood. Gloom is stylized in many ways on Air Lows, and Kastel renders it luxuriously on the unsettling final track, “The Closer The Stranger.” Mainlining bursts of what the artist might figure as “concrete void,” it immerses the listener in smudged bliss. Kastel’s work here suggests that negativity can be bountiful, overflowing: something we ought to “lay back” into, as she urged in the beginning.
