EDWARD KA-SPEL

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Release date and tracklist

2001
UK CD World Serpent CHI01CD

11 March 2013
NL remastered MP3 self-released on Bandcamp

Krzhyte Skreeë

From Bandcamp 2013:
First post-millenial solo album of EK .Fundamentally , a long suite of songs and scapes for the suite , “Our Captain’s Eyes” which clocks in at over 53 minutes. Recorded during a fruitful year when EK lived in Luxembourg.
Beautiful cover art is an original painting by Monadiki.

From Bandcamp 2023:
‘Caste o’ Graye Skreeens’ was the first album in a trilogy loosely alluding to seafaring adventures.

As a child I was a little obsessed by the legend of “The Flying Dutchman” and it was definitely at the back of my mind as this album from the the start of the millennium was painstakingly constructed.

The main piece ‘Our Captain’s Eyes’ pays tribute to Procol Harum’s ‘A Salty Dog’, a song that resonated deeply when I was young and makes me cry to this day.

Sadly “Caste” was seemingly doomed from the beginning. Perhaps the 53 minutes duration of the piece frightened people off but it was also one of the last releases by World Serpent before the company folded. Consequently it probably never reached a single shop. Nevertheless a couple of boxes of the original cd are in stock at Chez Dots.

The 2023 remaster splits “Our Captain’s Eyes” into five parts asI have to concede that my original concept was perhaps too extreme. The beautiful cover is an original painting by Monadiki.

Reviews

The bulk of Caste O Graye Skreeëns comprises the expansive ‘Our Captain’s Eyes’, based around a loose unstructured style where Edward Ka-Spel, frontman of the Legendary Pink Dots, lets his imagination run a playful course dropping in everything from ambient soundscapes, drum machines, dance beats, distorted noises and fragmented voices. Ka-Spel’s delivers his cryptic lyrics in his idiosyncratic sing – speak style, and via jaunty shanties over French horn. All points of Ka-Spel’s prolific musical career surface on this 50+ minute track – industrial, experimental, psychedelic and ambient music. Skreeëns is perfect for Ka-Spel’s debut World Serpent release as it shares many traits with David Tibet, and Steven Stapleton in traversing a peculiarly English outsider vision with a free-flowing range of sound and textures. – Compulsion Online

***

LEGENDARY PINK DOTS frontman EDWARD KA-SPEL has delivered a solo release for 2001 rather late, but the wait was worth it. Caste O’ Graye Skreens is a one-track CD with a multitude of songs or ‘movements’. The phases evolve over the course of 50-plus minutes from pulsating drum machine and vocal plays, creepy ambient horrorscapes, cut-up samples and distorted noises, familiar Ka-Spellian anthemic calliope music, and the occasional playful keyboard ditty. Various points seem to either hark back to the more sound-based (as opposed to song-based) LPD or pay tribute to Neu!, Residents, and the more experimental Pink Floyd era. – Ear/Rational.com

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