AMN Reviews: Diego Caicedo – Seis Amorfismos (2023; Burning Ambulance Music)

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.

Stylistically, Caicedo’s writing and playing manage to bridge the gap between modern classical, metal, and free-improv. Has anyone done something similar in the past? Not to my knowledge. Accordingly, I will use the word “unique” to label Seis Amorfismos, an album that is very well done.