Casten & Thornton release their debut album “Pandora” on March 26th, 2013; yet the duo has been making music and experimenting in sound with solo projects and various other collaborations for many years prior working together on Pandora. Eugene, Oregon, USA artist JD Casten has released eight albums since 2009 under the monikers Tie-dye Laces (shoegaze electronica) and The Rhythm Messiahs (trip-hop), and is a founding member of the hip-hop group Scorched Transmissions. He established the micro-label/publisher Post Egoism Media, which offers most of its content free in digital formats. Hailing from Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, Adam Thornton has been involved in various experimental sound and noise projects since 1993, including GREENman, UPhold, and Lemurian Congress. Casten & Thornton spent two years composing, refining, deconstructing, and producing the eleven tracks on “Pandora” – a true labor of love. The boundary line was conceived as a deliberate musical challenge, a mirage-line for jumping across or sneaking over, though some degenerate transgressives wear blindfolds and wander in any dizzy direction (mountains, lakes, oceans, prairie, the buttholes of long-dead ghost-bison, oceans of latent trouble everywhere) but the healthier ones hope for maybe – MAYBE – a fruitful collaboration! You might not know Pandora. Her honking elephant pipette is a sucker for genetics. It knows notes. It syncopates, because “more beats in more places mean better musics” said The Muse. You do not tame an elephant in the stereo field, you trick it in the same way you fool its long-lost cousin, the bull: you wrap your red-flagged urgent emails around the elephant’s eyes until it sees a long perpendicular line of scarlet exclamation points, then make a lot of noise with the blunt tools of two home studios: imaginations, experiences, enthusiasms, forgotten dreams. The elephant runs right across the line, trampling trunks and boxes and – “incidentally,” say the fools – letting every image and sound and half-baked concept out into the world: the first time they’ve seen lightning, even the samples are fresh! And if you – the surrogate us – are wearing your fastest running shoes you can keep from being trampled but still take credit for the result: an album’s-worth of applause. Then send the elephant back. See where it goes. Hope it remembers its past and future plans and doesn’t simply die, poor wild and brutal, painfully naive thing. Some of us object to the concept of capture; they hate these digital circuses where time moves at any speed necessary. These bits are quick-quick-slow. I don’t mean the bits which cross phone lines and boundary lines, I mean the ones which make dips and valleys and MIDI-bars with hardware, software, brainware, earwear. We’ve moved these bits and clicks, swipes, twiddles, and pokes. This is the Game Of Music. On two Christmases we rewarded ourselves with discounted plugins and wrapped ourselves in their byzantine manuals, written (too often) in the Orthodox tradition of Pythagoras first, Beethoven second, and we – the users, the bankers! – last of all. But the truth is in the thing in the end: it’s another bunch of bits, and also this ancillary group of afterthoughts, photographs, documents, and other interests that we figure are cool. Booklets have a beat as well, and so do you. Our beats may match and our melodic dips might dip with your moodswings, all to the joyful hope of your dance-partners, your daily struggle against entropy and eventual climb to new universes, stars, and eternity-eternity-eternity. Hits and misses are for another group of deadly bison who sit increasingly rarified in the cigarette-free atmosphere of their glassy zoos: the matching pairs of radio DJs just barely stayin’ alive. Unlike them we give you masses of honest stuff, and then we return to our sides of the line again, back to our spontaneous generations and the powdery ivory of ancestral graveyards. All elephants forget in the end. That’s you, the elephant, and that’s US!