“Caustics was never really a band” declares guitarist John Dieterich over email. “We were an ad hoc assortment of personalities resolutely allowing and even encouraging ourselves to not congeal into anything recognisable, even to ourselves.”

Touch – an album of archive recordings from a string of sessions that took place between 2006-11, in Oakland – features Yasi Perera of Park Details using voice and electronics, Josiah Wolf of Why? playing percussion, Devin Hoff of Julia Holter's band playing acoustic and electric basses and John Dieterich of Deerhoof on guitars, vocals and electronics.

“This music was recorded [...] during what in retrospect may seem like a simpler, happier time” says bassist Hoff. “At the time of these recordings there was no raging pandemic to grind the world to a halt and put the livelihoods of touring musicians (how some of Caustics earn—or earned—their living) into question. There were epidemics, yes, just on a different scale of awareness and reach. AIDS, SARS, EBOLA and more were ravaging communities in the peripheries of neoliberalism ignored by capitalist media, something that we as traveling musicians with global familial and filial connections were aware of, and we knew that musicians were at risk of. Trish from Broadcast, very much in our creative sphere, had already been tragically taken from us by one such epidemic. And the current ongoing and necessary worldwide uprisings for Black Lives weren’t happening on the scale that they are now, but we knew well that police brutality against Black and POC folks was also an epidemic.

"I know when these original sessions happened, I was filled with acute anxiety, both personal and political, which I can definitely hear in some of this music...Only speaking for myself of course, these improvisations accomplished what to me is always the goal of improvising: an act of chaos magic that transforms those in earshot of the sound waves, if not necessarily the world beyond. There was a sense of hopeful desperation for many of us in the years that spanned the making of this recording, and we used whatever means we could to alter our reality; in this case—but not necessarily always—through manipulated sound.

“If art has any hope of bringing about any kind of social change” concludes Deitrich, “maybe it's through presenting a never-ending stream of models for independent thinking and for disorganised and flawed metamorphosis; for the invention of our own rituals and for being able to disagree while still maintaining contact and forging meaningful relationships.”

Touch is available to pre-order from Deathbomb Arc as a download on cassette via Moone Records now.