Dryft

The process by which musicians name their projects can sometimes seem just as arbitrary as the way in which cars are assigned license plates. With Mike Cadoo’s Dryft project, however, the name is perfect. If pressed, one could call it something of an eternal side-project continually adrift on the periphery of a musician known as much for his eclecticism as for his prolificacy.

Beginning in 2000 while with the IDM/industrial outfit Gridlock, Dryft provided Cadoo with an outlet to pursue drum-n-bass. The resulting album, Cell, mixed influences such as Dillinga and Photek with the melancholy and introspection of IDM to form a frantic yet bittersweet counterpoint to the overly-aggressive yet somewhat unfeeling style of drum-n-bass that ruled the late 90s.

Two years later, as Cadoo advanced with Gridlock, Dryft resurfaced with the Mytotyc Exyt EP. Although certain drum-n-bass hallmarks remained, this mini-album focused on "click-hop"—a meld of hip-hop and glitch music pioneered by groups such as Funkstorung, Prefuse 73 and Techno Animal. Where Cell offered frenetic pacing, Mytotyc Exyt provided more of a gnarled stutter with ripped-up rap vocals for garnish and collisions lurking around every corner.

Advance eight years to 2010. Following Gridlock's 2005 demise, Cadoo's primary focus has been Bitcrush—a shoegazey rock project with few ties to the electronic crunch of previous obsessions. Ventricle, a new Dryft album, has also surfaced and deviates from the Bitcrush sound just as previous efforts strayed from Gridlock. This time, however, it’s fair to describe Dryft as bearing more resemblance to Cadoo's past than to any passing flirtation with fringe genres.

Moreover, like a message in a bottle, it is as though all that Cadoo had failed to completely express through Gridlock had been stored away subconsciously and now, as Ventricle, that bottle has finally washed ashore. While Cadoo is the first to acknowledge the stylistic similarities between Ventricle and his contributions to Gridlock, he warns against making specific comparisons. This is new music. Caveats aside, the massive, enveloping drones and rusty clatter that anchored his former band are omnipresent. Powered by overdriven, symphonic walls of slowly evolving melodies matched with rhythms that recall the drum-n-bass of Cell, the industrial battery of Gridlock and the jammed funk of Mytotyc Exyt, Ventricle is a true opus that offers revolution and retrospective in one. No matter the degree of hyperbole applied, the term "side-project" has never felt more out of place.

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