Infidel?/Castro!
Bioentropic Damage Fractal

Some music is an experience, so far from the monotony of everyday life and so close to the discomfort of this life, to all the 'whys' that uselessly afflict our existence.

This music is perfectly represented by Infidel?/Castro!, a Philadelphia duo composed of George Korein and Colin Marston. The album's title (a double album, nearly 90 minutes long) is very significant: “Bioentropic Damage Fractal” from 2005, one of the best in the past ten years. Already in their two previous albums, "Case Studies in Bioentropy" and "The 49-Day Period Between Lives", the theme concerned bioentropy, which is the property by which biological things tend to disintegrate, to inexorably break down to make way for something new.

On this, Hermann Hesse said: “When man is born he is tender and weak; when he dies he is hard and rigid. Plants are tender and delicate when they are born; when they die, they are dry and withered. Therefore, the hard and rigid are companions of death, while the tender and weak are companions of life. A weapon too hard will break; a tree too rigid will crack. What is hard and rigid withers, what is tender and weak blossoms.” This music is the softest thing that can exist, with unexpected and violent changes of direction, a meticulous collage of metal destruction (very little), electro-acoustic and ambient, as they themselves say: "...a mixture of dissonances, distortions, and sludge(metal) attacked from all sides by both played and sampled percussion, with ambient interludes that provide soft, meditative spaces". Thus, their music is extremely plastic and variable, it expresses life, or rather the natural process of transformation that ensures life. Ultimately, these compositions are like a prospective vision of the planet's history summarized in a few minutes, where there is no plan or program, Nature is indifferent, and everything depends on chance. The disordered progression represents those great and unpredictable random events that change the course of events. Everything is seen in a detached way, like the skeptic who observes the succession of life and death, the struggle to survive that inevitably succumbs to the new, disintegrating to make room for a new cycle.

Despite all this seeming complicated, the listening is not difficult, indeed it is engaging and touching, close to something ancestral forgotten in the recesses of our brain, that is, the fear of disappearing. Despite knowing how things go, we always refuse to accept them and think (we want) that everything is eternal. Perhaps it is so difficult to accept death because we cannot give it meaning and thus cannot give life meaning, or simply because it is absurd that death is the meaning of life.

The last tracks of both albums are long, almost ambient compositions, chilling frescoes of desolate landscapes after the catastrophe or soundtracks during the apocalypse, moving and poetic narratives of disintegration not only of matter, but above all of souls, of feelings, of memories, of nostalgia, in short, of everything that distinguishes us from simple matter. “What will remain of me? Of the earthly transit? Of all the impressions I had in this life?”

Probably it is impossible to find answers, perhaps there simply is no reason.

“…And all those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… It’s time to die.”