Dwellers by CAIV

With Dwellers, language and symbolism run deep as CAIV, a new collaboration from Israel Vines and Camille Altay, challenges listeners to embrace the ambiguity of existence, and accept incongruity as a vital part of the whole.

CAIV was borne of the partnership initiated on Israel Vines’ 2021 track, Keeping, and Dwellers delves into the realms of sound, semiotics, and half-obscured meanings, starting with the word-association from the pair’s chosen moniker that led to the EP’s title.

As Vines explains, “CAIV is obviously our initials combined, and we both liked the "cave" references that it brought to mind - digging, exploring, existing pre-modernity and continuing underground through the ages.”

Across the four tracks CAIV use both language and rhythm to create a dense strata of significance and buried meaning - titles like Göbelki Tepe and Ötzi 2.0 reference prehistoric relics whose full history is unlikely to ever be unearthed, while Cymbalism and Shamanfreude exhibit a joy in word play that hints at the very old and modern at the same time.

Altay explains this further, “This convergence of pre-civilized ironies, opposites, conundrums, conjectures, this is what I love about these great human discoveries. There is no definitive answer - someone hazards a guess that is grasping for meaning. We can only feel our way towards the truth of it, based on the signs and symbols we know and have associations with.”

Fittingly, the music itself is deep and reverberant - combining primaeval rhythms with modern sound production and unexpected instrumentation. The opening track, Cymbalism, is built around samples of Altay interacting with Polish artist Alicia Kwade’s TunnelTeller - a sculpture they describe as “resonant metal tubes and concrete, resembling an instrument waiting to be played”; again this neophile urge to do things differently leads them paradoxically to techniques that might have been second nature to humans thousands of years ago.

Altay can’t fully put a name to this drive: “I feel like in the music we write, Israel and I are grasping toward a language that we both share and grew up speaking, but can’t actually write down. It’s referential, and specific, but hard to describe…we live on opposite sides of the country, so the music we send back and forth feels a lot like we’re signalling to each other by lighting fires on a mountain. It’s a way to communicate deeply over a great expanse with a nonlinear gesture.” It is this instinct to transmit experience in novel ways which drives the CAIV project.

CAIV is a bi-coastal exquisite corpse of dance floor compositions by vertebrate musicians and longtime friends, Camille Altay and Israel Vines.

Banner collage art by Jennifer Haybach.

Photo by Bek Andersen

Israel Vines
Camille Altay
Tresor Records