Cahill//Costello - Offworld (Gearbox)

Glasgow duo Cahill//Costello chart an improvised course under sheltering skies and ocean depths, with their minimalist debut Offworld

Recorded in voluntary isolation during August 2020 on the westernmost reaches of the Scottish mainland, Offworld is the first sustained work of recorded improvisation by Glasgow duo Cahill//Costello. Minimalism is the path taken, but that isn’t to suggest that nothing much happens. Indeed, the album’s moods and textures seem to imply narrative structures imbued with mythic qualities. That’s certainly how things begin.

“The Visitant” emerges, as if from the sea. Like Poseidon wrestling a version of reality out of crackling radio waves, Kevin Cahill’s undulating drones are a mass of analogue wash given fluid form by Graham Costello’s rolling drums. Arriving after this storm-as-vision, “Pavan I” and “Pavan II” chart quieter human stories told upon the beaches – minimal compositions that ebb and flow with restrained almost-post-rock dynamics, courtesy of some feverishly imagined Arvo Pärt Young Team. “We Rebuild Them” then channels the out of time and in another place sound designs of David Lynch and Dean Hurley, with its otherworldly industrial goings-on.

The listener, now blissfully lost, wanders underneath the sheltering sky of the title track and along the shores of this gently unfurling dream world. Distant yet up close and personal free jazz drumming is beamed in from the core; at once imminent and already happening. Swirling guitar evokes some version of early Virginia Astley where the pastoral has been desaturated until it is but a remembrance of autumn inside deepest winter. Further in, “Pylons I” is an improvised expression of night-time music which signals something else is about to arrive – another visitant perhaps? “Pylons II” answers the question by ascending into blistering intensity, bringing a cycle of creation and destruction to crescendo. The vision, the dream, the music – it must all pass, and it does, retreating back into the water until called for once more.

Cahill//Costello Bandcamp

Gearbox Records