Ian Boddy & Chris Carter - Caged (25th Anniversary Edition) (2000/2025)

TG’s electronics whizz meets a Geordie synth botherer at the cusp of a new millennium in this 25th anniversary edition of an overlooked trip, originally deployed on the latter’s label, DiN, now expanded with two unreleased bonus bits by Mute.

‘Caged’ emerged as the one and only duo LP by Carter x Boddy in 2000, and was at the time effectively the former’s last full-length jaunt for almost two decades, bar his work with X-TG and reworks of Chris & Cosey. If not given the date of creation, one might be hard pushed to place ‘Caged’ on timelines, mostly due to its meld of modular tactility and clinically plotted digital dimensions that unfold with a glacial sleekness and scale in 3D cyber-dubbed space.

We’ll take an educated guess and presume that Carter is primarily behind the album’s internal, rhythm-driven architecture, with deep bass pulses providing ballast and catalyst for stepping and glancing hyaline shapes that we’d more readily associate with Boddy’s prolific oeuvre of analog synth releases since 1980. That said, it’s still anyone’s guess as to whose hands are on what knob, as ‘Caged’ executes its functions in a broadly cinematic arc from the hovering darkroom swag of ‘Concussed’ thru the silvery stepper ‘Underdub’ with a grittily streamlined thrust swaying from aqueous, slow-mo kosmiche on ‘Coriolis’, to illbient lurch on ‘Aura’ and the floating, OOBE-like ‘Disembodied’, to dankest fetish dungeon creep the emerges in new bits, ‘Claustrophobia’ and the tart gasps of acrid emissions to ‘Uncaged’.

Tracklist
1. Concussed (2025 Remaster) (7:57)
2. Coriolis (2025 Remaster) (10:05)
3. Slab (2025 Remaster) (5:14)
4. Aura (2025 Remaster) (10:06)
5. Disembodied (2025 Remaster) (6:24)
6. Caged (2025 Remaster) (7:32)
7. Underdub (2025 Remaster) (10:28)
8. Claustrophobia (9:12)
9. Uncaged (8:05)