Kasket is the musical moniker of 22-year-old Brighton based Charlie Baldwin. Born into a musical family, Kasket began his journey into sound at an early age -as a drummer he played with such R&B/Jazz luminaries as Geno Washington and Ralph Salmins before starting to write and produce his own music at the age of sixteen. With 2 acclaimed Eps already behind him, Kasket continues his ascent with his first EP, Autumn Fades on Apollo Records.
Citing Steve Reich and percussion heavy jazz as some of his main influences, it's no surprise that Kasket's music takes the listener on excursions into complex rhythmical territory, but his grasp of melody and harmony is just as profound. Using found sounds, live and electronic drums, various synths and vocoded vocals, Kasket creates a beautiful, unearthly noise and pulls off the difficult trick of creating a sound which is full of musical reference points while also sounding entirely original.
Kasket kicks off the EP with Fallen, and it's apparent from the off that here is an artist very much ploughing his own unique furrow - the track has a polyrhythmic bounce that veers towards bhangra, tethered by a deep melancholic synth chord sequence and a heavily distorted vocoder. It's a deeply idiosyncratic piece of music and illustrates immediately that Kasket is emerging as a real 'voice', eschewing genres and trends within electronic music to instead pursue his own brightly coloured vision.
Following on from Fallen, Kasket eases back into Mia, a piece of low slung, breathy post r&b, that slowly and surely burns into a full blown piano epic - backwards keys and strange reverbs and effects that propel the track towards avant garde territory.
Rounding off, we have the title track - Autumn Fades, perhaps the EP's most dazzling moment, which kicks off sounding like a techno Captain Beefheart before shifting up into a manic bounce: a vivid riot of bass, crisp percussion and impatient drums. Next Kasket introduces a vocoded vocal and wild synths swirls, before dropping the intensity with a beautiful string led breakdown and ending with what sounds like a mournful, synthetic colliery band.
Autumn Fades is a fitting climax to a record that introduces an artist who arrives seemingly fully formed. Mirroring the bold, independent vision synonymous with Apollo records in his own music, Kasket seems to have found his perfect home.
