Mundo das Ferramentas translates as “World of Tools,” a title that immediately shifts attention away from conventional instrumental performance and toward the physical means by which sound is made, altered, captured, and assembled. Io Casino’s principal instrument is the electric bass, but she does not treat it as the dependable foundation beneath a band. She approaches it as a box of materials: strings to bow, scrape, strike, prepare, overload, loop, and pass through electronics until the original gesture becomes difficult to identify. The bass is both instrument and workshop. Its familiar low register remains important, yet the album continually discovers other bodies hidden inside it: metallic cries, rough pulses, distant drones, unstable harmonics, percussive knocks, and tones that appear to rotate slowly through the room. The “tools” are not only the objects in her hands. Recording machines, effects, magnetic tape, MiniDisc, room acoustics, and repetition all participate in reshaping the source.
Recorded between 1999 and 2001 with a Sony four-track MiniDisc recorder and an older Fostex four-track cassette machine, the album carries the character of two domestic technologies meeting at the turn of a new century. Cassette introduces friction, saturation, hiss, and the possibility of gradual physical wear. MiniDisc represents a smaller, cleaner, digitally edited future, though still one tied to removable objects and dedicated hardware. Io Casino works between these systems rather than concealing them behind studio polish. The recording feels handmade because its layers retain different depths and surfaces. Some sounds stand sharply in front; others arrive clouded by processing or buried inside accumulated resonance. Instead of correcting these differences, Casino uses them to create perspective. Each track becomes a small landscape assembled from recordings made at different distances from their source.
“Absolute Roma” opens with the sense that an object is being examined from several angles without ever being identified completely. Bowed and processed bass tones stretch into a dark horizontal field, while smaller disturbances rise inside them like pieces of machinery catching against one another. The title joins certainty, “absolute,” to a city whose history is composed of overlapping ruins, governments, religions, streets, monuments, and ordinary lives. The music behaves similarly. No single layer erases what came before it. Sounds accumulate as partial architectures, with older vibrations remaining visible beneath newer ones. Casino’s method is patient but not passive. The track contains suspense because each sustained tone may suddenly reveal another edge, pressure point, or hidden frequency.
“Influenza” is more agitated and bodily. The title can describe both disease and influence, an invisible force passing from one organism to another and altering whatever receives it. Casino’s bass seems infected by its own processing. A gesture returns changed, multiplies, and interferes with the next gesture until the instrument no longer appears to belong to a single stable body. The piece has the nervous energy of something spreading through a system, but it avoids the obvious drama of acceleration or impact. Its movement comes from transformation. Friction becomes vibration; vibration thickens into noise; noise opens briefly into space before another contaminated layer arrives. The track demonstrates how repetition in experimental music need not mean exact recurrence. A sound can return carrying the damage produced by its previous appearances.
The two-minute “Zen” initially appears to promise relief, yet its brevity makes it closer to a concentrated act of listening than a peaceful interlude. Casino does not present meditation as decorative calm. Attention here means remaining with the grain of a sound long enough for its apparent simplicity to divide into multiple events. “More Frequencies” expands that principle. The title sounds almost like an instruction given during the recording process: add another band of vibration, search above and below the obvious register, discover what the equipment has not yet disclosed. Bass is usually defined by depth, but Casino is interested in the full electrical afterlife of the instrument. Harmonics, feedback, processing artifacts, and amplified surface noise allow one source to occupy an unexpectedly broad spectrum.
“Bajo, te llaman” can be read as “Bass, they call you,” a phrase that gently questions the adequacy of the instrument’s name. Calling something a bass tells us where it is expected to sit within an arrangement and what service it should provide. It is meant to support, anchor, reinforce, and remain underneath. Casino frees it from that social assignment. Her bass can become atmosphere, interruption, architecture, or a source of pictorial abstraction. It need not hold a song together because the act of investigating its possibilities becomes the composition. This gives the album a quiet feminist dimension without requiring a declared program. A woman bassist working inside an experimental field takes an instrument commonly assigned a supporting role and makes it the complete environment, composer, material, and subject of the record.
The enormous central work, “Conducting Hurricanes,” opens the private workshop to a group of major experimental voices: Francisco López, Kasper T. Toeplitz, Tibetan Red, Víctor Nubla, and Josep Giménez. The title is a wonderful impossibility. A hurricane cannot truly be conducted. Its behavior emerges from immense atmospheric systems that exceed individual control, yet a conductor may still enter the process by guiding forces rather than dictating every event. The piece works that way. López contributes sound materials associated with environmental depth and uncertain origins; Toeplitz brings the physical intelligence of electric bass and electronics; Tibetan Red and Nubla connect the work to Barcelona’s long industrial, improvisational, and sound-art history; Giménez participates while also mastering the album. The results are denser than the solo pieces, but the added complexity does not become a crowded demonstration of famous collaborators. It feels like several weather systems being allowed to encounter one another.
Low rumbles, feedback, environmental traces, bowed matter, and electronic pressure circulate through the twenty-one minutes without settling into a hierarchy. At moments the piece appears to be approaching a recognizable industrial climax, only to disperse into quieter atmospheric movement. Elsewhere, apparently separate sounds begin behaving as one enormous organism. This is where the album’s title becomes most vivid. Every participant brings tools, but the tools do not remain obedient. They produce consequences, resonances, and interactions too complex to belong to one person. The studio becomes less a place where sound is controlled than a chamber where forces are introduced and observed. Conducting means listening closely enough to know when intervention would reduce what is already occurring.
The brief “I Want to See You” follows like a private sentence spoken after the hurricane has passed. At just over two minutes, it cannot compete with the scale of the preceding track and does not attempt to. Its title introduces direct human longing into a record largely concerned with objects, frequencies, tools, and altered instrumental identity. The album was dedicated to Àngel Casino, who died in 2001, and this closing phrase inevitably acquires additional tenderness in that context. Without turning the entire recording into an explicit memorial, the dedication changes the emotional temperature of its final moments. Tools preserve traces, but they cannot restore presence. Recording can hold vibration, gesture, and a particular arrangement of time, yet wanting to see someone exceeds what sound can provide.
That tension gives Mundo das Ferramentas its enduring emotional depth. On one level, it is a focused exploration of prepared electric bass, analogue and early digital recording, drone, improvisation, and post-industrial atmosphere. On another, it concerns the human need to make objects carry experience beyond the moment of its disappearance. A bass string vibrates and stops. Tape moves past a recording head. A MiniDisc stores coded fragments. Collaborators enter a room, produce a collective weather, and separate again. The album gathers these temporary actions into a world whose tools continue working after their makers have put them down.
Io Casino emerged from a particularly fertile Barcelona environment in which concerts, radio, visual art, improvisation, neighborhood organization, and experimental sound were not treated as isolated professions. Her work with Gràcia Territori Sonor helped create spaces in which unusual music could be heard as part of a living local culture rather than imported as an elite specialty. Mundo das Ferramentas carries that spirit. It is intensely personal, but not sealed away from community. The solo bass investigations lead toward a collective centerpiece, then return to a final miniature of longing. The structure moves from private technique into shared weather and back toward a solitary voice.
More than two decades later, the album still resists easy placement. It contains drone but is too tactile to dissolve into ambience. It touches industrial music without depending upon aggression, machinery, or ideological imagery. It uses improvisation while retaining a strongly composed sense of scale and sequence. Above all, it understands that an instrument contains more futures than its traditional role permits. Io Casino enters the world of tools not to master every object, but to discover what happens when tools are allowed to suggest their own uses. Anyone who heard these pieces in Barcelona, encountered the original Gràcia Territori Sonor edition, or knows more about the construction of “Conducting Hurricanes” could add valuable detail. The workshop remains open, its low frequencies still moving through the walls.
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