Out Here – Page 1 – Music – Dallas – Dallas Observer: “The third cassette in the 10-tape series from local avant-noise collective Vas Deferens Organization, this is indeed the sound of men playing with their penises in public. But God love ’em, they aren’t ashamed about it. Art-rock, Krautrock, trance-rock–whatever the tradition it’s all noise on this end, sound effects and static meant to evoke a mood and create an atmosphere. It’s the legacy of Faust and Neu! and LaBradford taken to the nth degree, where sound becomes pure noise and dreams give way to nightmares and music becomes ‘music’ by definition alone. The sound of the sampler and the computer, human sounds (Arabic chants, exotic percussion, guitars) blend with the inhuman (beeps and squawks and squeals and distorted static) to create something bizarre, frightening, ridiculous, unreal, unlistenable.
That’s not to say Castille doesn’t know all this: The tape, divided into the ‘Acid’ and ‘Opium’ sides, proudly displays its pretensions in everything from its silver-and-black slip-on cassette condom to the noise on the tape. And though a good hunk of the cassette plays itself out like a radio tuned into five stations at once (hell, five countries at once) with the static in between, sometimes he actually achieves something quite remarkable: The Middle Eastern samples on the far more effective ‘Opium’ side contrast extraordinarily with the noise effects (maybe they’re horns sampled into a computer, maybe they’re created by the computer itself), and the result is something just this side of Eno’s ambient sound tracks. It’s actually quite beautiful in spots, even creepier in others–no doubt Castille’s intention from the get-go.”
