Alain Wergifosse / Javier Hernando / Ángel Lalinde
Casamata
SPAIN INDUSTRIAL COMPLEXX ICO44 CD (2026)
Strong piece of contemporary industrial sound-art from these important Barcelona creators. Hernando and Lalinde we have encountered already. In 2022 they produced the surrealist album Vacuola, with its delicate but disturbing sounds evoking the experience of dreaming. The same could be said of Dómina Esteléctrica, the 2023 solo record by Hernando, weaving a poetic spell through ambiguous sounds and confirming its intentions with meticulously-realised cover art collages. The reader is advised to revisit these posts for some further background detail on the historical Ortega Y Cassette label (managed by Hernando and Lalinde), Xeerox, and Melodinamika Sensor.
The Belgian Alain Wergifosse is not Spanish, but is established in Barcelona and widely recognised as an important part of this underground movement which flourished 40 years ago. I see he added keyboards to a few 1980s ambient-synth cassettes made by Guillermo Cazenave for the Spanish Ecos label. Later, he made a solo electronics album Deep Gray Organics for the famed Geometrik label (mostly a home for Esplendor Geometrico, the big boys of the Spanish industrial genre), which I see we reviewed – rather sketchily – in issue 9 of TSP.
For Casamata, these three players are pooling their experience and sharing ideas on a set they regard as entirely consistent with their artistic development over time. At the same time, they’re creating something so vital – “density and primal rawness” is their motto – that it could have been produced when they were 40 years younger, just starting out at the cutting edge of DIY tape experimentation and noise. To put it another way, there’s a real zest and passion at work, sparking with the intensity and enthusiasm of young men speeding around the city in their roadsters with a case of Rioja on the back seat. The press release does stress that they are using modern tools – so presumably it’s mostly computers, digifiles and ProTools rather than cassette decks and battery-operated synths – but I like the idea that they are “reinterpreting their own rules”, and recasting the early nightmarish menace of Industrial Noise into these more modern forms. “A true fortress of noise, memory, and avant-garde”, to use their own expression.
Picking up on the “fortress” metaphor, Casamata – the word translates as Casemate, a specific kind of architectural form used in fortification – the whole record is structured to guide the listener through this imaginary edifice, with eight track titles delineating the plan as surely as a blueprint. More tellingly, the early parts of the journey are characterised by intense violence and noise; at the exact centre of the album, the sounds shift into something more reflective, ambiguous, and detailed, such that we can almost see the brick walls (hopefully stained with damp and lit by a single bare bulb) growing up around us. But this is very far from being a literal-minded realisation of the theme; the imagination of the creators is strong enough to sublimate their sources, constantly mutating the rough and textured layers into new forms, revealing windows in the fabric that allow us to peer in and view the construct from different angles.
A very strong and exciting release, no wasted space, every moment teeming with powerful near-sculptural noise. (13/02/2026)