Diego Caicedo – Eidos Daimonium (2025; Burning Ambulance Music) – Avant Music News

Guitarist, composer, arranger, improviser, and music teacher Diego Caicedo is back with his second release on Burning Ambulance Music. Eidos Daimonium is a follow-up to 2023’s Seis Amorfismos, which was one of our favorite albums of that year.

This effort is largely along the same lines as its predecessor. It features a string quartet, gritty and heavy guitar, and a death metal vocalist. The quartet is nontraditional with violin, viola, cello, and double bass. The music is structured as a mix of composition and improvisation (free and conducted), leaning slightly toward the former.

The string quartet alone would be an interesting listen, as its output is angular, intense, and biting. But combined with Caicedo’s overdriven distortion and growls from Carlos Jorge, Eidos Daimonium goes over the top. To that point, Los Mecanismos Blasfemos de lo Abyecto Resurgen begins slow and tense with discordant tones and a wall of noise from Caicedo. Carlos provides voiceovers that evolve into singing and infernal chants. The strings and Caicedo then explore crunching riffs that are so bizarrely structured and timed that they seem to barely hold together.

Two instrumental tracks are of note. Paramitera Ephaestiüs establishes Caicedo’s chops as he joins the strings in a cacophonous four-minute buildup to barely controlled chaos capped off by an intense guitar solo. The title track is a deluge of sculpted distortion with any strings buried deeply in the mix. Additionally, Islas de Estabilidad may initially come across as instrumental but Carlos provides atmospheric vocalizations to accompany Caicedo’s massive chords and spiky picking, with outside modern classical elements from the quartet.

Eidos Daimonium is heavy, dark, and uncompromising. Not unlike Seis Amorfismos, this release is a product of Caicedo’s unique vision. Artists have been attempting to combine metal with classical music for decades with limited success until recently. Caicedo’s fearless and cerebral approach of employing the most extreme aspects of each is remarkably successful. The result is a superb album that should be on the shelf of any sonic explorer. Bravo.