Dryft Ventricle CATMD181

Ventricle is the latest album from Mike Cadoo's long dormant Dryft side-project. The album deviates from Cadoo's current main project Bitcrush just as previous Dryft efforts strayed from his previous group 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 (2000), the industrial battery of Gridlock and the jammed funk of his Mytotyc Exyt EP (2002), 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. [Learn more about Dryft...]

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Well, it’s only appropriate that I polish off the second part of our n5MD special with a surprising return of the label boss, Mike Cadoo, as Dryft. It’s been an entire decade since Cadoo released his solo debut album, Cell. Prior to exploring his drum’n'bass demons, Cadoo worked with Mike Wells under their celebrated Gridlock alias, with numerous releases on a variety of labels. The last full length album, Formless, was put out by Hymen in 2003. Right about that time, Cadoo sprung off in another direction, with live instrumentation and glitch infused shoegaze, releasing lauded work as Bitcrush on his own label, n5MD (see part one of this special for his latest). And just when I thought that Cadoo would abandon his signature dark and crunchy IDM sound altogether, he awakens from his hibernation as Dryft with Ventricle! This is more than just a “side-project” – in this hard hitting, industrial-strength comeback, Cadoo admits to explore the subconscious compositions and explorations of his mind since the disband of Gridlock. As if there were a few things unsaid, Dryft brings back the “massive enveloping drones and rusty clatter” that has left us in the dark, aching for more… But make no mistake – Ventricle is not the ghostly echo of the dormant Gridlock – this is the new sound of Dryft, pushing the envelope of experimental IDM further up a notch. A must for any fan of dark and cinematic passages, wrapped in solid beats and drenched in morphing DSP. Recommended if you also like Kattoo, Access To Arasaka, Hecq, Somatic Responses, Architect and Nebulo. nowlikephotographs

At Nowlikephotographs, we most often refer to Mike Cadoo as Bitcrush, the shoegazing post-rock project on the n5MD label. Before Cadoo “went post,” he was half of the now famed post-industrial electronica outfit Gridlock, which stopped producing its gritty, ambient-tinged industrial music in 2003. The Bitcrush-naysayers may have lamented the eight-year hibernation of Dryft (and ten years since the “Cell” release), but they may weep no longer (and the rest of us will enjoy the latest installment in Cadoo’s lengthy catalog). Hovering in the aether between side-project and long-lost Gridlock spawn, Dryft resurfaces with a release that threatens to eschew both the aforementioned labels. ”Ventricle” does exactly what we expect it to – let loose the synth-drenched hard-driving beats we all know have been lurking in Cadoo’s id since he started extensively experimenting with live instrumentation (and subsequently pursuing Bitcrush nearly full-time), but to also reflect Cadoo’s progression in the construction of cohesive, yet enigmatic works. With elements of the harder electronics of Gridlock, immersed in waves and washes of ambience, and steeped in the waters of dormancy, “Ventricle” is no collection of B-sides and lost tapes – and Dryft is no side-project. textura

As if producing albums under the Bitcrush name and overseeing one of the most consistent high-quality electronic labels around isn't enough, Mike Cadoo has somehow managed to squeeze in the resurrection of his long-dormant Dryft project. It came into being on the 2000 album Cell, born from Cadoo's desire to infuse the overly aggressive style of drum'n'bass then rampant with the bittersweet melancholy of IDM. Two years later, the Mytotyc Exyt EP found Dryft's focus shifting to click-hop. Now, eight years on from that, Dryft returns with an album of epic scope designed to be played loud for maximum impact.

Opener “Recalcify” initially suggests that Ventricle will be a celestial ambient outing before the piece mutates into a large-scale electronica workout complete with combustible breaks. The wall of sound gradually built up in that track carries over into the subsequent material—“Vector Step (Regeneration)” one such example—where one confronts symphonic blends of ambient, industrial, and electronica powered by beat structures with roots in jungle and drum'n'bass. If there's a prevailing mood, it's melancholy, with some tracks pushing the material's emotional potential to a fever pitch (e.g., the mournful “Vapours and Waste”). Throughout the set, the bass drum hits as hard as a stomach punch, and synth elements rage with epic fury. The music's symphonic dimension is also on full display throughout. Strip away the clattering drums and ambient atmospheres of “Vapours and Waste,” for example, and its graceful arc of string layers would stand out all the more clearly. “Knives As Gifts” is a firestorm of classic drum'n'bass, with those familiar rolling snares overlaid with a torrent of viral noise and synth strafings, while “No Bargains, No Pleas,” following an elegant strings intro, settles into industrial-IDM mode with skittish beats wrapped in blankets of ambient synth swirls.

As a sidenote, it's interesting that, in actual fact, Ventricle sounds as much like a quintessential Tympanik Audio release as it does an n5MD one. The widescreen mix of beats and strings roaring through tracks like “...And Again” and “(Re)Prise” identifies Ventricle as a veritable template of sorts for many a Tympanik Audio outing. Think of Dryft as n5MD's harder side, a counterbalance of sorts to the label's less aggressive output. cokemachineglow

Holy shit: that’s the best way to describe this surprise sophomore from Dryft. Literally, as shit from the afterlife. Mike Cadoo’s long-dead side project was considered by many to have been a one-record release, playing second fiddle to his full-time running of the n5MD label. No one hated on him for letting the alias crumble, as 2002’s Cell was thought by its listeners to be a milestone in dark drum-n-bass, and what better way to preserve a milestone than by not going one more mile further? In Cadoo, d-n-b perfectionists had found a one-off programmer who understood software and audience appetites so harmoniously he had to retire and run an IDM label. So he’d allowed his brightest brainchild to lapse only one EP later—for a former vocalist turned record label executive, the man had made his mark.

What no one would have thought while they were eulogising Cell was that Dryft was merely on ice, and was booked to return in eight years’ time without stealing the first album’s thunder. Ventricle, the crunchy and light-soaked comeback, is jaw-droppingly beautiful…but angry—like fashion models. On top of that it also packs brainpower, and that makes it extremely dangerous. Cadoo’s cavalier programming feels almost geological this time: the man is an expert on layers, with dark industrial as Gridlock, shoegaze as Bitcrush, and now luminescent echoing as Dryft behind him. On Ventricle, it’s as if all his previous material has been poured into a cylinder and whisked by professional utensils, the same way the BFG mixes dreams.

Dryft+8’s first shocker is that the hard-nosed battery of the first LP has gone, replaced with a series of frosted Alan Silvestri soundtracks. It’s as if Cadoo’s love for building floor-warping bombs has been diverted, and he’s now happy to mastermind snowy firework displays instead. Any worries the Cell worshippers have will—I promise—vanish when the tranquilising sheen of “Recalcify” hits them. Frankly, it’s sheer bliss, and when the choreographed static and beat first drops, you’ll understand why the record takes its name from the heart. If you long for 1980s film warmth but wish it came with an anti-wince device, then Dryft is your destiny; check out the likes of “Vapours and Waste,” where Terminator tones slide across one another, a wafer-thin army beat in the background. If anyone else out there felt tortured by the short-term resurrection of Toytronic Records, here is your methadone. Nine shots.

But not each piece of Ventricle forms a stratospheric landscape, or a version of Autechre with pulled teeth. At least one cut here is a holdover from Cell, with track three being the obvious choice for the one live round in the chamber. If “Marked Velotin” was Cadoo’s idea of hypnotising electronica, then “Knives as Gifts” is the bucket of water to the face, and not, as its name implies, second prize on a quiz show. This is a mean, glistening riptide of beats, showing dubstep wannabes how it’s done by throwing a live cable into their set-up. Hoovers and hatchets come spinning towards you while the bass stands refined and towering, ready to fall at the first cry for help. It’s the closest thing you’ll get to the d-n-b of Cadoo’s Gridlock releases, and if your sound system can cope with this one, you need to give it gold wiring as a thank you. “Transmission” explores a different kind of aggression: that of looped Israeli radio code with a bizarre Cockney inflection. There’s someone here cooking up a unique white noise that sounds like laser harps being played in sea mist. Yes, Dryft might be getting older, but he’s a long way from cardigan time yet.

Cadoo’s biggest achievement with Ventricle, though, is the way he’s finally chained all his styles together: if one part was built for soundtracking scenes of Soviet devastation, the other part is punchy and Arctic, as crisp and salty as seal breath. Dryft’s mix of rousing booms and spirited wonderings is as lively as it pacifying, and the perpetrator adds emotion to what could be itchy beats with the nimbleness of a toy car constructor. Few can mix catharsis and corrupt data this finely—finely, as in even Mumford & Sons fans will go “whoa”—and few could marvel at the way Mike Cadoo can switch genres without mixing instruments (this only happens once, by the way, on “...And Again,” where his shoegaze chums shake up some drums for him).

In fact, given this year’s releases alone, not many could deny that Cadoo and his label should really be more widely celebrated. n5MD is an imprint you can utterly depend upon, and if that means having to wait the odd eight years for side-project masterworks to surface…well, go traveling or something. Ventricle has unquestionably been worth the wait, with a tough blue clarity so exquisite Michael Mann would go down on one knee for it. The only question that remains to be answered is: Where will another eight years find us? Hopefully somewhere with an abundance of miracles, as bombed-out nuclear towns can’t possibly be this beautiful twice.

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