BAND OF THE WEEK: Cavernancia
BZZZRRRRFFFGHTTTTZZZZZZZZGGGBRRRR.
Despite being relatively widespread these days - and having their roots in experimentalist and avant-garde music that is decades old, of course - noise and drone are still weird genres to tackle. In fact, that can be generalised to all kinds of truly experimental and non-linear music. So much of it has to do with context, with personal experience, and sometimes even just with who is doing it. It’s a superficial way to look at it, but it does happen. Just this past week, for example, I saw Aaron Turner do a solo performance at a festival (which was more of an ambient, textural thing than really noise or drone, but still, the argument fits anyway), and it took me the best part of fifteen minutes to realise that it wasn’t doing anything for me. So essentially I went through both ends of that phallacy - on one hand, it took me more than 30 seconds to go like “fuck it, this just sounds like he’s tuning his guitar forever and I can’t be arsed” because it was an artist I deeply admire doing it, but on the other hand, I wasn’t in a mood to understand the deeper meaning of what he was doing. Some people told me afterwards it was a deeply transcendent experience for them. I had that a couple of days before with Caspar Brötzmann strumming a bass for the best part of an hour, a transformative event for me which for many people roughly translated to “huh?”
So yeah, it’s one of those that I picked for you guys today, although as far as noise/drone goes, this new release of Cavernancia, ‘no chão’ (translated as ‘on the floor’), is pretty direct for this kind of thing, and especially in comparison with the previous output of the project. Less than 45 seconds go by before you’re already drowning in what feels like a bottomless lake of fucking fire, and for the next 40 minutes, there isn’t much in the way of peaks and valleys - it’s pretty much all peaks, each one just reaching higher and higher than the previous. It’s not a constant barrage of gremlins jumping up to eat your face, and the width of sound that gave the previous releases such a notion of space and freedom is still there in a way, but most of this new material is harsh, punishing, ominous and sinister. Skip to that part around 25 minutes where a piercing shriek competes with a cavernous (there we go, band name pun unplanned but very appropriate) rumble and unspeakable feedback distortion torture as to which of them will completely obliterate your hearing first.
See, the thing is, I happen to know the person behind Cavernancia, the gentleman called Pedro Roque - he is also a very talented photographer, he’s fronted punk and grind bands before, and throughout these many years that we have been good friends, we have always shared a love for fucked up music that will just rub you the wrong way in as many diverse forms as possible. Just a quick example of how the dude’s mind works: at that very same festival (the lovely Amplifest) I just mentioned where Aaron Turner and Caspar Brötzmann played, me and him had a DJ set together (you might recall my previous post where I gave you guys our full setlist), and we did it the ping-pong way, each of us alternating one song. He ended the set with that lovely ditty called ‘Noise Not Music’ by Detroit’s finest noisemongers Wolf Eyes:
But while that’s adventurous/crazy enough to play to an actual audience on a DJ set at a big festival, that’s not the story. The real meat of the story is that, before he played it, he told me “but I’m going to fuck the whole song up.” Which he did, by applying a few filters and twisting some knobs and turning it into an even more disfigured aural abomination. So we’re talking about a brain that hears that “song” up there, and its first reaction before playing it to people is, “could do with a bit more unpleasantness.” So to go back to that crazy bit of various competing noises around the 25 minute mark of ‘no chão’, in a regular situation I would say that you can, figuratively speaking, picture the malicious glee in the musician’s expression as he piled up the various loud screechy bits, but this time, I actually literally can imagine him doing that, and I know for certain that’s what happened when he wrote it.
And this is an interesting direction to take this project, it has to be said. The two aforementioned previous full-length releases, 2021’s ‘em ciano’ and ‘manto’ which came out earlier this year (and that you can listen in its entirety here), while not exactly toothless, were much more textural and based on atmosphere and mind-expansion rather than this kind of sonic attack. I have no idea where Pedro will take this next, but seeing as parts of ‘no chão’ are basically a few black metal vocals away from not sounding out of place on a Wold album, maybe there could be one or two albums’ more worthy of exploring this vein.
More than anything, this release shows how much there is to explore for Cavernancia. A recent collaborative performance with a violinist, Maria da Rocha, at a local festival called OUT.FEST (of which you can see a few wonderful photos by photographer Vera Marmelo here), for instance, gave us yet another dimension to the project’s sound, and how bringing in other like-minded artists to the fold can help mutate Pedro’s singular output into something else entirely.
Knowing him, the next chapter, whatever it might be, will probably happen in just a few months, too. That gives us barely enough time to swat all of those sound gremlins from ‘no chão’ off our face, so get started on it right now. You won’t regret it.
Find Cavernancia on Bandcamp, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.