B-Side Guys

Photographs accumulate dust, but anxiety remains fresh. Adie Kaye’s work as Island Wastrel excavates the particular dread that clings to places designed for order—schools, hospitals, bureaucratic waiting rooms where humanity gets processed through systems that barely acknowledge its existence. “The Haunting” channels this institutional paranoia through deliberately damaged folk arrangements that feel simultaneously ancient and artificially constructed.

Kaye’s engineering background at RAK Studios serves him well in reverse—he knows exactly which rules to break and when. The track’s production aesthetic deliberately sabotages the clean precision he’s capable of achieving, instead embracing the kind of analog imperfections that make recordings feel genuinely haunted. Acoustic guitars drift through analog haze while telecasters provide jagged punctuation, creating an atmosphere where nothing feels quite stable or trustworthy.

The repetitive lyrical structure mirrors the bureaucratic experiences it documents. “We stand in single file” and “we wonder who’s alive” become mantras of institutional anxiety, repeated until they lose meaning and become pure rhythm. Kaye’s “electro detective” persona emerges as someone trying to solve mysteries within systems designed to prevent understanding—”my head’s full of screws / And the screws are magnetic” captures the specific helplessness of feeling controlled by forces you can’t quite identify.

Kaye’s vocal performance embodies the disorientation his lyrics describe. His delivery slides between decades without warning, sometimes sounding like a folk revivalist, other times like a post-punk experiment, occasionally like someone speaking from inside a fever dream. This temporal instability reflects the way institutional spaces exist outside normal time—waiting rooms where minutes stretch into hours, processing centers where personal history becomes irrelevant data.

The track’s final burst into “delicate and chaotic free improvisation” provides release from the systematic oppression that precedes it. After minutes of controlled anxiety, the music suddenly explodes into unstructured expression, suggesting that the only escape from institutional haunting might be complete abandonment of form itself. Kaye has created a piece that functions as both documentation and exorcism, capturing the specific terror of being reduced to a number while maintaining enough human chaos to resist total systematization.