Diego Caicedo
The heaviest chamber music you'll ever hear
Guitarist and composer Diego Caicedo’s Seis Amorfismos consists of a six-part suite for electric guitar, extreme metal vocals, and string quartet, followed by three pieces for solo guitar. It was released a little over a year ago, in October 2023, on Burning Ambulance Music, and it sounds like nothing else you’ve ever heard. When it came out, Avant Music News wrote in part,
Every so often a release comes along that purports to be “like nothing you’ve ever heard.” After engaging in an appropriate amount of skepticism, we take a listen and — more frequently than not — the album falls short of this selling point. But not every time, and Diego Caicedo’s latest proves to be one of these rare exceptions.
Caicedo is a guitarist and composer who wrote all of the music on Seis Amorfismos. His technique derives from heavy metal, with the requisite distorted chording and use of sculpted feedback. But his playing comes across as more open-ended than most with improvised passages in between the written sections.
But where the album truly differentiates itself is with the remaining instrumentation — a death metal vocalist and a string quartet. Carlos Jorge provides the growling, which merges nicely and unobtrusively with Caicedo’s amalgam of warped sounds. The quartet provides depth and complexity to the tracks, though their main contribution is a ramp-up in tension. While the guitar is in your face, the strings subtly pull at the emotions to create a sense of foreboding through use of extended techniques and short droning motifs.
The Wire liked it too, writing,
The space where extreme metal, contemporary classical and non-idiomatic musics meet already hosts a number of intriguing projects. Catatonic Effigy’s Putrid Tendency and Abhorrent Expanse’s Gateways To Resplendence are prime examples of musicians with backgrounds in jazz and improvisation using their avant arsenal to mutate gnarly black and death metal into even more twisted forms. Where those outfits rarely stray from typical metal song structures, stretching and expanding the material from within rather than completely deconstructing their skeletons, Seis Amorfismos starts at the other end, reverse engineering the genre’s fundamentals.
The six main pieces here were written with a chamber ensemble in mind — a string quartet expanded with electric guitar and voice — but arranged to mimic the unnerving density and weight of metal. The strings alternately join in circling, squealing, manic dances over distorted guitar textures, providing a hellish backdrop for Carlos Jorge’s growled poetry recital; or take a step back, opening up sections of pummelling guitar attacks in which Caicedo makes his instrument sound like pots tumbling down stairs, popping fireworks and the hammering of steel pipes. Comprising intricate free improv sections and grungy soundscapes, three solo guitar pieces then close an album that contains some of the heaviest, most intense music I’ve heard all year.
Listen for yourself:
Diego himself says:
“I was born in Bucaramanga, Colombia on August 6, 1977. Music attracted me a lot since I was little. And metal attracted me much more. The first vinyl I ever bought was Iron Maiden’s Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son. From there, many more followed: Voivod, Anthrax, Slayer, Metallica, Sodom, Celtic Frost, etc., etc.
“My first instrument was my mother’s acoustic guitar. At the age of 14 I had my first private teacher who taught me the basic chords. At 15 my second private teacher taught me more chords, various scales and techniques for electric guitar. We made a band with my high school friends playing covers of AC/DC, Metallica, Pantera, Alice In Chains, etc., etc.
“When I finished high school I entered the university, in the music department, and I studied music theory, counterpoint, harmony, history, classical guitar, classical piano and jazz guitar. I focused on composition and orchestration and I was lucky enough to study with maestro Blas Emilio Atheortúa (1943-2020). He had been a disciple of Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) at the Torcuato Di Tella Institute, where he studied with the great composers of the second half of the 20th century: Dallapicola, Maderna, Messiaen, Malipiero, Xenakis, Copland. I spent a large part of my university studies attending his classes. At the end of my studies I did a diploma in composition with Atheortúa too. I did a workshop with musicians from Barcelona who came to Colombia…and then I traveled to Barcelona to study at L’aula Del Liceu, where I stayed for three years.
“I stayed in Barcelona; I’ve been here for 21 years. I am part of the free improvisation scene and I work in a music school where I teach guitar and theory. In addition to metal/extreme metal, I am passionate about so-called ‘classical music’, about jazz, free jazz and free musical improvisation.
“Seis Amorfismos arose as an aesthetic exercise based on my passion for chamber music by great composers and my passion for extreme metal, and at the same time, as a matter/question: could a string quartet work with an electric guitar as a chamber quintet within an extreme metal (death/black) metal aesthetic? The main hurdle was the rhythmic aspect, how to replace the drums and how could I solve it with the quartet itself. I solved it with rhythmic/technical aspects for the bowed strings.
“I devised the harmonic aspect based on the polyphonic composers from the 11th to the 15th centuries: Perotín, Leonin, Di Vitri, Machaut, Dufay, Dunstable, Des Pres, Ockeghem, Willaert, Hildegard Von Bingen, etc., etc. The harmonic base arises from an almost minimal material and how this material can be related to a group of four voices in the form of polyphony/counterpoint with a harmonic/homophonic base.
“Another obstacle was in the relationship between the written/set music and the improvised parts. The Six Amorphisms are written for friends, great improvisers with whom I have worked on many projects over many years.
“And finally, the lyrical/textual aspect arises from the readings and films that I returned to over and over during the gestation process: Carl Jung’s The Red Book; Psychonaut, Liber Null and Liber Kaos by Peter J. Carroll, The Book of Pleasure by Austin Osman Spare, El Ombligo de los Limbos by Antonin Artaud, The Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin, The History of Ugliness by Umberto Eco, The Beauty and the Sinister by Eugenio Trías, the work of William Blake, and above all Aullándolo, which is a collection of poems by my older brother Jorge Caicedo.
“Films: all of Roman Polanski’s works, all of David Cronenberg’s works, all of Alexander Sokurov’s works, all of Abbas Kiarostami’s works, all of Alain Resnais’s works, all of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s works, all of the work of Luchino Visconti, all the work of Federico Fellini, all the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, all the work of Sergei Parajanov, etc., etc.
“I wrote the voices for my friend Carlos Jorge, with whom I have worked on several projects, especially with my project called MALIGNÆ. I decided to do a kind of guttural vocal chorale for him.”
Here’s another track to check out:
Diego is currently in the process of putting together another album, which I’m hoping to release next year. In June, he told me, “I have the new pieces finished, it will be a string quartet with viola this time, and a little heavier. I composed a strict ‘preludio y fuga’ as well.” And in the September 2024 issue of The Wire, as part of a report on the scene in Barcelona, writer Daryl Worthington reported,
The day after I speak to [bassist Alex] Reviriego he is due to rehearse in an unconventional string quartet of two violins, cello and double bass led by Diego Caicedo, a guitarist born in Colombia who now calls Barcelona home. As showcased by Caicedo’s Seis Amorfismos from 2023, there’s a heavy dose of dissonance and abrasion in his music. Any ornateness a string quartet might connote is drastically contorted and redirected through detuned riffs and guttural vocals.
“The string quartet parts are written down. There are complex harmonies. You have to study it, it’s not anything goes. But there’s a metal influence. It comes from outside the academic world,” reasons Reviriego.
So while we all wait for the second volume of this incredible, high-intensity music, you should absolutely buy Seis Amorfismos. It’ll take your head off. Get it from our Bandcamp page — and I highly recommend opting for the physical CD, which comes in a beautiful gatefold mini-LP sleeve printed on textured paper.
That’s it for now. See you next week!