Who is CASISDEAD?

In early 2024, I saw CASISDEAD perform at a small club called Bitterzoet in central Amsterdam. Typical of the area, it wasn’t far from the Red Light District and the weed coffee shops that attract gangs of stag and hen parties all year round but also nestled among the bougie bars and restaurants that appealed to well-heeled locals.

From the outside, with its stained glass windows and red velvet exterior, it didn’t look like the type of venue a grimy rapper like Cas would play, but the fuzzy synths and brain freeze-inducing bass from ‘All Hallows’ were unmistakable once we approached the entrance and went downstairs; passing the grotty, yellowing walls covered in hundreds of stickers and graffiti tags, and crossed the sticky red floor, through the busy crowd and towards the stage. Bitterzoet, which translates into English as bittersweet, is an appropriate name for the location.

Read this next: New book What do you call it? tells the history of UK rap

I’ve lived in the city for four years, but the first two were written off thanks to COVID-19. I arrived with my family in a new country, with a new job (which I soon hated), all set for new beginnings. Instead, time stood still. So I wanted to make up some ground and watch a rapper who had resisted time by being around for more than a dozen years but had only just released his first album. Surprisingly for a rap show, CASISDEAD started his performance in Bitterzoet not on schedule, but early. I stumbled around looking for a time machine. The sign said that the future was none of my business, but I found the present for the first time in a while.

Aside from a joke about gripping his mic so hard he’ll end up with “hands like [the England and Everton goalkeeper] Jordan Pickford” and vague talk of being nominated for a BRIT Award that weekend, there was very little banter from Cas. It could have been down to impatience, nervousness, or the fact that CASISDEAD quite simply does not give a fuck. Still, together with his DJ – and surrounded by his mates, or the “Dead Team” as they’re known, passing round joints on the small stage – they played banger after banger of hard, funny, nihilistic rap over an eclectic combination of trap beats, Giorgio Moroder-inspired synths and a 2-step-style song I haven’t heard before, Cas credits the new school garage producer “big up Conducta for this one.”

It was the final show of a short European tour supporting his new album, ‘Famous Last Words’, and a near sell-out crowd was lapping up the newest, old hero of UK rap. This meant a few old favourites like ‘All Hallows’, a wicked wordplay of Britishness, where Cas raps about celebrity chefs (he holds a long-running fixation for Nigella Lawson), alongside newbies like ‘Venom’ and ‘Traction Control,’ continuing the record's synth-heavy '80s sci-fi futurism aesthetic. “I just jumped out the morgue, ain't nobody fresher / Only MC on my level, M.C. Escher,” Cas spits, acknowledging the Dutch graphic artist known for his mind-bending optical illusions and mathematically inspired art, paintings of dizzying landscapes of impossible staircases.

Cas makes intensely visual music. Look through some of his music videos, which he is closely involved in creating, and his eerie vision of retro-futurism will soon coerce you. Yet it’s Hieronymus Bosch, another Dutch artist, that Cas’ music reminds me of, which Walter Gibson describes as, “A world of dreams [and] nightmares in which forms seem to flicker and change before our eyes.” Cas is the drug-addicted dealer, the “psychologist's wet dream” who falls in love with the prostitute, pacing pavements, stomping the dirty, seedy streets of North London sometime between night and day, after the after party, wraps in his back pocket, the coke drip stinging the back of your throat, “Bowie banging in the tape.”

It’s all a powerful act of make-believe.

After the show had finished, hanging around outside, my friend bummed a cigarette off a couple of young lads who had travelled all the way from Dover for the show. They were boisterous Cas stans, still buzzing about his recent performance at London’s KOKO, where regular collaborator Giggs joined him on stage for a surprise performance. “It was sick, mate!” “Cas is a legend,” said another with eyes as red as the sinking sun.

Read this next: “Growth in everything”: Giggs, UK rap’s most influential MC, is still building

It’s not just fans who worship Cas, but musicians too. Producer and Daupe! label boss The Purist, who has collaborated with Action Bronson, Danny Brown, Westside Gunn, and Loyle Carner, among others, is unequivocal when we speak: “I've worked with some of the best, but he is the best rapper I've ever worked with. Other people aren't even close.”

Although MF DOOM, the masked villain of rap and another one of The Purist’s collaborators, is the closest comparison I’ve seen in terms of a cult following for a rapper from the UK (DOOM may have been born here, but he left the country as a baby). There are noticeable differences: DOOM was prolific, releasing dozens of albums and singles through various character aliases before his untimely passing on Halloween in 2020. Cas works at a more prosaic pace. And DOOM’s rap style was (is!) denser, a hyper-imagist with intricate rhyme schemes and – similarly to Cas – layered with double and even triple entendre, sprinkled with humour and unexpected references. (When I interviewed DOOM in 2011, speaking on the comedic influences in his music, he confessed, “I love Benny Hill. His shit is retarded.” They were different times).

These unexpected references extend to sample choices, with DOOM foraging elements from the Brazilian jazz-funk of Azymuth, classic '90s boom bap, recorded poetry by Charles Bukowski, Scooby Doo cartoon samples, and everything in between, together with Stendhal syndrome-inducing rhymes. Cas’ sonic tastes are focused on sleazy '80s electro, R&B, and new wave–like the inventive flip of The Go-Go’s founder Jane Wieldin’s schmalzy ‘Whatever It Takes’ into the 80s slow-groove yuppie anthem ‘Matte Grey Wrap’. Cas seems to relish taking the most asinine sample and alchemising it into a brutal coke rap. As The Purist explains, when they first started working together, “it was leftfield stuff. We sampled things like New Kids On The Block and flipped them. So we had ‘You Got It (The Right Stuff)’ and made a track called ‘The White Stuff’."

The closest similarity is the breadcrumbs both artists leave in their songs, like hieroglyphs to a larger supervillain origin story that drives fans to a frenzy, trying to find out more. Then there are the stylistic affectations: both employ all caps in their rap aliases (and good luck finding out Cas’ real name) and use of a mask to protect their identity.

Both are guardians of the rap avant-garde.

Read this next: Ty and the history of UK rap

For the uninitiated, CASISDEAD was once known as the grime MC Castro Saint. He has repped Tottenham since day one, and though details are more than vague, he may have released as many as a dozen singles in the mid-noughties, the best-known of which is ‘Chemist’, which appeared on JME’s ‘Boy Better Know Vol. 3’. The voice and drug dealing subject matter is familiar, but Castro is in grime mode, faster and more aggressive in his cadence. The tempo for ‘Chemist’ floats around 140 BPM, but, in a sign of things to come, the subtle synth pads have a scent of faded '80s glamour to them, like a budget Tony Montana and Elvie ducking into the toilet cubicles of The Nags Head bopping to Duran Duran on a rainy Friday night in North London. However, before listeners could become fans, Castro Saint was gone.

The reasons for Castro’s disappearance from music vary, from jail sentences to a severe motorcycle accident and cancer diagnosis. Still, Castro reemerged as the masked CASISDEAD (or, CASisDead as he was stylised at the time) in the early 2010s, and any trail to Castro practically vanished. Cas’ rebirth was completed with ‘The Number 23’ mixtape, released in late December 2013. The title was a likely nod to the “23 enigma,” a term coined by the experimental writer William S. Burroughs and further developed in Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger, the preeminent book on counterculture beliefs of the 20th century. The 23 enigma is a slightly kooky belief that the number 23 has a special significance in our lives, popping up in the most curious and often inexplicable ways.

Most mixtapes act as a calling card, a taster of an artist's potential or a way to maintain momentum between full releases, but 'The Number 23' came out fully formed – a dystopian universe haunted by and simultaneously haunting CASISDEAD. Production comes from grime producers JME, Faze Miyaki and the more hip hop-leaning work of The Purist and Skywlkr, the tour DJ and regular producer for Detroit maverick Danny Brown, who is responsible for the monstrous ‘All Hails’. After boasting about being the “necro negro” on ‘T.R.O.N.’, Cas lets rip that he has a “Flow so cold when I let go, adagio or allegro / Hear my life as an echo, over grime and electro. It's nothing like you've heard or seen / You know what I mean?”

Adagio and Allegro are tempo markings that refer to the speed or BPM of music. Adagio is slow and almost ceremonious, at about 55-65 BPM. At nearly double the speed Allegro is described as “fast and bright”. Make no mistake, for all the over-the-top narco-dealing horrorcore stylings of ‘The Number 23’, it becomes early evidence that CASISDEAD is an accomplished songwriter and a sound scholar. He’s someone whose musical antecedents explore the niches of UK rap and club culture, as in the Wiley-esque eskibeat style signatures on ‘Baraka’, while simultaneously professing his love for '80s pop royalty Kate Bush – the beginning of Cas’ video for ‘Pat Earrings’ includes a drone camera shot across an uncanny forest and has more than a hint of Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights Version 2’ video while the sample, Clint Mansell’s ‘Waves’, sounds like an off-key piano melody of the same song – and having the Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant appear on his long-awaited debut album.

Read this next: A book chronicling the social history of British rap and grime

The most memorable song from ‘The Number 23’ is ‘Drugs Don’t Work’. Produced by the experimental bass producer MssingNo, the Verve-sampling track, supplemented by the harrowing music video released the summer before, was an immediate jaw-dropper: a full-born confessional so convincing, it had listeners wondering if Cas’ drug-addled lines of character-work were true to life. As the protagonist sinks into depths of inexplicable darkness, Cas’ pen game reaches new heights, as if it’s been possessed by the spirit of Prodigy of Mobb Deep and Irvine Welsh, with Wildean flourishes like, “Spent most of my life in the dark / Chasing the light like a moth.”

What Do You Call It? by David Kane is published by Velocity Press. Buy it here