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Wherein Derek Bailey, the measure by which other improv guitarists strive to equal, plays along to rhythm tracks created by: Henry Kaiser, John Oswald, Casey Rice, Tied and Tickled Trio, Jim O'Rourke, Bundy Brown, John French, Loren Mazzacane Connors, and more. There's been a bit of controversy involving Henry Kaiser, who has sent out a public statement complaining about the music being out of phase or something (he's really unhappy with the way the recording sounds), but Bailey puts the issue to rest with his own statement:
"Although you wouldn't know this, occasionally I play 'live' with DJs or tracks by DJs. I never go direct to the desk or anything else. Nor do I wear earphones. This kind of 'live' situation is what I wanted to replicate in the studio. No direct line, no earphones, a mike on the amp and one on the guitar; one take only on each track. Which is exactly what Toby did for me, to my complete satisfaction. In essence, Playbacks is a live recording, not a studio recording. There are a number of reasons why I do this but the main one is musical. I want a mix of ambient and non-ambient sound. Integration has to be musical NOT technological and obviously so. THE WAY THE RECORD SOUNDS IS THE WAY I WANT IT TO SOUND.
"Let me try and remove any possible ambiguity: The success or otherwise of this record depends almost entirely on the success of the playing. If I thought at the time that this end would have been better served by recording it in the street, I would have done so. These are what is known, in some circles, as artistic decisions. If I made a similar record again, I would do it in exactly the same way."
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THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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East-meets-west in unusual fashion as legendary free guitar improviser Bailey teams up with Min Xiao-Fen and her pipa on the relatively-delicate Viper, then really rips it up in his second meeting with Japanese progcore bass/drums duo Ruins on Tohjinbo, a worthy follow-up to their prior, equally out-there collaboration on Tzadik.
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Derek Bailey, one of the world's most innovative improvisers, with the Japanese bass-heavy Ruins.
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Improv legend Bailey's live 1980 guitar accompaniment to a "percussive" dance performance. Sparse (with the sound of falling rain figuring prominently on one track) and beautiful. Brought to you by John Fahey's new Revenant label.
The latest lovely musical missive from local label Time Released Sound comes in the form of this stunning collaborative effort from two artists we had never heard before, Christophe Bailleau and Julien Demoulin, who create billowing sprawls of softly swirling synth shimmer percolating melodic glimmer. Liquid, languid expanses of electronic flecked kosmische synthscapery, equal parts psychedelic space out, drifty new age ambience, and hushed atmospheric mesmer.
The tracks range from pastoral and melancholic, to haunting and ghostlike, the sounds warm and organic one minute, dark, rumbling and gristly the next, drifting moodily from prismatic sun dappled dreaminess, to dark contemplative mesmer, long stretches cast in shadow, that move gradually into the light, blossoming into lush, layered beauty. So nice.
Like all Time Released Sound releases, there are two versions, this is the super limited Deluxe edition, which is limited to just 100 copies, and is housed in an 8" x 5.5" machine sewn booklet, each booklet is made from an antique negative still, with all sorts of original artwork sewn into the pages of the booklet, diagrams, drawings, wall paper and other antique papers. Every book is hand stamped, drawn on, scribbled in, and beautifully personalized. The whole thing packaged in a hand stamped translucent envelope.
The latest lovely musical missive from local label Time Released Sound comes in the form of this stunning collaborative effort from two artists we had never heard before, Christophe Bailleau and Julien Demoulin, who create billowing sprawls of softly swirling synth shimmer percolating melodic glimmer. Liquid, languid expanses of electronic flecked kosmische synthscapery, equal parts psychedelic space out, drifty new age ambience, and hushed atmospheric mesmer.
The tracks range from pastoral and melancholic, to haunting and ghostlike, the sounds warm and organic one minute, dark, rumbling and gristly the next, drifting moodily from prismatic sun dappled dreaminess, to dark contemplative mesmer, long stretches cast in shadow, that move gradually into the light, blossoming into lush, layered beauty. So nice.
Like all Time Released Sound releases, there are two versions, this is the more nice priced, slightly less limited version, which houses the cd in a hand stamped printed envelope/sleeve, with a printed cardstock insert.
We weren't all that familiar with Matteah Baim really, other than the fact that she was one half of the Metallic Falcons, with Cocorosie's Sierra Cassidy. Death Of The Sun is actually not that sonically distant from the Metallic Falcons, however where that group was a sort of prog metallic folk, a patchwork of moody free folk, druggy rock, and lush choral arrangements, Baim's solo record is self described 'new age grunge', and thus much more subdued, intimate and personal. Her voice husky and raspy, sexy and sort of torch-singery, drifting over sparse and dark soundscapes, muted and murky, swirling and gently throbbing, the main melodies pecked out on a reverbed piano, simple but quite stirring. It's hard not to hear Cat Power in the vocals, but the arrangements are not that polished at all, instead, they're hushed and lo-fi, lush in their own homespun way. Imagine a countrified Grouper with Chan Marshall on vocals and you might be getting close. Abstract and dark, minor key and so so lovely.
Plus have a gander at the guests: Devendra Banhart, Jana Hunter, Rob Lowe (Lichens) and a bunch more...
Aidan Baker continues to be ridiculously prolific, and continues the pattern of recent releases, with this latest songsuite, the sound leaning more towards minimal jazziness and hushed creeping slowcore. The difference this time around, is that Already Drowning is based on myths and folktales about female water spirits, and thus, Baker recruited a handful of female vocalists to interpret each song in their own style. While a few of the singers we were familiar with (Jessica Bailiff, Carla Bozulich), most were new names to us, but they all do amazing things with Baker's dark, haunting arrangements.
The opener is one of our favorite here, a woozy, murky ballad, the instrumentation super minimal, vocalist Clara Engel playing the sultry chanteuse, with the chorus offering up a super dramatic, subtly processed vocal line, that definitely is the most dramatic part of the track. Baidan also chops up her vocals and peppers the tracks with fragments of her singing, adding even more of a mysterious abstract vibe. Jessica Bailiff's track is almost Portishead-y, with swirling strings, a low slung bassline, and a mesmerizing motorik rhythm, Bailiff using her voice more for texture, and a brief bit of spoken word, otherwise, her voice is deep in the mix, the result is definitely dramatic, haunting and dreamily cinematic.
The next few tracks all feature vocalists we had never heard of (Valerie Niederoest, Maude Oswald, Joanna Kupnicka, Liz Hysen, etc.) but form a powerful centerpiece for the record, Baker conjuring up skittering swirls of ambience, the vocals layered into spectral swirls, underpinned by swooping backwards guitars, very psychedelic, before slipping into a dark folk, replete with accordion, acoustic guitar, and jazzy drumming, the sound almost Parisian, before again shifting into a hushed soft focus dirge, programmed drums, stately piano, the sound here exploding into squalls of Hermann like strings and churning low end thrum, the sound closer to Nadja than anywhere else on the record, howling and intense, but always settling right back into that slow motion shimmer, then finally, Baker improbably fuses dark jazz (his fluttering flute and moaning trombone a big part of the sound) and a Mogwai like brooding slow build, which at first is definitely a weird combo, but soon reveals itself to be quite cool and super dense and dramatic.
Finally, Carl Bozulich lends her distinct voice to the closer, a collaged tangled of jazzy drum skitter, pointillist piano, staccato string plucks, lots of swirling backwards effects, some funereal horns, Bozulich's vocals sampled and swirled into a shimmering psychedelic cloud that wreaths the proceedings, while in the foreground, she croons a harrowing lament, over Baker's suitably haunting sonic backdrop. So gorgeous.
Another new Aidan Baker release, another sublime gem. And again, we find ourselves wanting to just review it with a single sentence. "New Aidan Baker. If you are a fan, you will love this. So buy it." But look at the rest of this list. If we had that sort of self control, and if we weren't so inclined to gush, this list would be a whole different beast.
But before we get into it, you might as well take our aborted abbreviated review to heart. If you are a fan, you WILL love this and should probably buy it. So fans can push the buy button and move on. Except for those fans who aren't so sure they need another Baker disc to add to the already-threatening-to-collapse Baker/Nadja cd shelf at home. You all can stick around, along with the folks who might somehow be asking "who the heck is this Aidan Baker guy and what's he all about?" The simple answer just requires a visit to the aQ website, and a quick search on either Aidan Baker or Nadja. There you can read all about it, and listen to almost everything we've carried by him/them. But as with all Baker releases, this one is a bit different, and bears a bit more of a description.
Book Of Nods begins with a 8 minute drift that sounds remarkable like a more subdued Necks jam. Simple piano figure repeated over and over, slowly shifting and changing, but looped and hypnotic and dreamily repetitive. Almost like a much more mellow and muted Lubomyr Melnyk, soft flurries of piano blurred into indistinct streaks, quite lovely. The 18 minute follow up is another sort-of-jazz sprawl, slow smoldering drones, super spare abstract percussion, warm and languid and laid waaaaay back, before the original slow motion drift is subsumed by some Pop Ambient washed out whir, giving the track a strange alien ethereal sheen. Track 3, "Obsession", is like a dubbed out hybrid of Low and Bohren, jazzy slowcore, allowed to slither and crawl, the drums a bit more skittery, some of the melodies effected, and flipped backwards, allowed to swoop and thhhhwp, there are even some fluttering flutes, again, bringing to mind a Necks style jazz jam, but give a bit of an electronic tweaking. The 15 minute closer, is yet another slow burning jazzy slowcore crawl, but here the drums are a bit harder, the mood is much more ominous and foreboding, everything wreathed in deep shimmering drones and distant rumbles, peppered with still more swooping backward beats, steaks of feedback, building to an intense, skittery, skipping coda, sounding a bit like Oval remixing the Necks. Nice.
And thus somehow, yet another Baker disc well worth owning! And not a bad place to start for the newbie, although the sounds here are unlike most of Baker's output.
Beautifully packaged in an oversized fold over textured paper digisleeve, with a dearth of information, just various Asian calligraphic characters. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
The Aidan Baker / Nadja musical onslaught shows no signs of letting up any time soon, but we're sure as heck not complaining. This week's Record of the Week is the blissy doom of Nadja's Touched, we also have the vinyl reissue of Bodycage, and then we've got this, Broken & Remade, a definite new direction for Baker, who for this disc, used 4 to 8 second samples of live recordings of analog instruments -- guitar, bass, flute, drums, violin, trumpet, and voice -- to construct these moody, almost jazzy soundscapes.
If you're not listening to close it does just sound like some modern jazz band, crawling through a particularly blissy and smokey jam, the Necks for sure come to mind, as does Bohren Und Der Club Of Gore. The drums shuffle, the guitars buzz, the melodies are serpentine and dreamy, the obvious looping is kept to a minimum, at least in the beginning. Imagine the Bad Plus covering Oval or some Fennesz / Necks remix and you might get a rough idea. The second track, is a bit more glitchy and obviously sampled, but it doesn't take Baker long to build a killer groove, turning all of those little sonic fragments into some sort of Spring Heel Jack, Boards Of Canada dreamy almost IDM shuffle. Even at its smoothest and most straight ahead, Baker laces the proceedings with little bits of digital filigree, a kick drum sputtering repeatedly, a simple lick chopped and reassembled into a little burst of stuttery fuzz, a note here or a drum beat there flipped backwards, it all adds subtle bits of weirdness to the proceedings.
Later in the record things get decidedly more aggressive and freaked out, with thick slabs of distorted sound turned into stuttering fuzz drenched drones, chopped into staggered sonic pulses over drifting mariachi trumpet. Intense post rock workouts gradually become more and more dense until they are dizzying squalls of skittering drums and tangled guitar melodies. Pretty far out, but the songs never become unhinged, this is not any kind of Shitmat style mashup, this is a lot more subtle than that, some seriously deft composition, creating an immensely appealing alien post rock jazz, unlike anything we've heard before.
While Baker fans and Nadja obsessives will NEED this, folks into Boards Of Canada, Spring Heel Jack, Bohren, the Necks, the Bad Plus, and even stuff like Portishead and other late night groove merchants might really dig this as well.
There was a while, where every New Arrivals list had at least one release from Aidan Baker on it, whether solo or with Nadja, and heck, there were plenty of lists with two, three, sometimes even four AB releases. And even though they were all pretty great, it was hard to not get overwhelmed. Even beyond being able to AFFORD that many records, that's a lot of music to take it. So after a stretch of hearing very little from Mr. Baker, this new record of processed solo guitar comes as a nice surprise, and not just because we were actually hankering for more, which we of course were, but also because it's actually quite lovely, a dark and delicate collection of hushed, blurred ambience, that right off the bat reminded us a bit of Oval's Diskont 94, but where that record created a lush landscape of liquid shimmer from skipping cds and digital errata, Baker accomplishes something similar with just a guitar and some effects, transforming his guitar into a softnoise generator, in fact, this is the perfect music to lull you into a deep trance, it's not hard to imagine this as the perfect white noise machine for weirdo underground music nerds, the sounds a series of smeared swirls, at times sounding like some super minimal modern classical music slowed way down, and at others, an expanse of layered lush dronemusic, the first half of the record tends toward a super hushed soporific drift, but the guitar seems to become less obfuscated toward the end of the record, the songs becoming more like abstract Appalachia, but still looped and blurred into hypnotic stretches of woozy mesmer, culminating in the record closer, which pairs a warbly bit of guitar loopage with lush lustrous chordal swells, and some more distinct melodies, mournful and melancholy, all of which seem to bleed into each other, transforming the song into something impossibly lovely, yet still utterly hypnotic.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
Another in the recent trilogy of new releases (along with Light Of Shipwreck and Luasa Raelon reviewed elsewhere on this list) from one of our favorite labels, Crucial Bliss, a dronier driftier offshoot of the Crucial Blast label. And as the names should make obvious, the stuff on Crucial Blast -blasts-, and the stuff on Crucial Bliss, is, well� blissed out.
So here we have yet another release from the man who does not sleep. Ever. He couldn't possibly, he must spend every minute of every day and night doing nothing but recording gorgeous spaced out driftscapes (under his own name) and crushing slow motion pummel (as Nadja). This is release number ten in just about a year, and that's not even counting all the microreleases and limited editions that slipped by us completely. But as we've mentioned time and time again, it's all good. Really good. Great in fact. So as folks trying to review all this stuff, we definitely get overwhelmed, but for the listener, who in their right mind would complain about more amazing and mysterious sounds�
This new one, is all electric guitar, recorded live, and manages to merge Baker's two sonic sides. The dense and the airy, the heavy and the pretty, the delicate and the intense. Two half hour epics, the first track is a roiling swirl of deep reverberant whirring and soft buzzing, sometimes thickening into an almost SUNNO)))-y wall of sound, but just as often shimmering dreamily, peppered with some super chaotic stretches, where things get really intense, bordering on straight up noise, sounding almost like Total, massive ur-drone, speaker melting white noise, but somehow twisted into something pretty.
The second track is much grittier, the sound more raw and lo-fi, very industrial at the outset, but as the track progresses, strange melodies drift up from below, the sound gets smoother and more washed out, and then somehow, even as it gets prettier and prettier, it also gets heavier, the sound getting louder and more blown out, culminating in a gloriously blurred blast of in-the-red, white hot, blissed out buzz, the aural equivalent of staring into the sun. So nice.
As with all Crucial Bliss releases, the packaging is super swank, an oversized fold over thick cardstock sleeve, full color inside and out, the cd attached to a plastic hub affixed to the sleeve.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
It's tough not to joke about Baker's ridiculously prolific output. Same with Acid Mothers Temple. Every time a new record comes out, we don't really want to mention it at all, but we sort of feel remiss if we don't. It sort of comes with the territory, when you begin averaging a release a month, maybe more. But if you're anything like us, and it seems you pretty much are, then when you decide to love an artist, you want everything they put out. And like you, we've decided to love Aidan Baker, which means not only a million Nadja cds, but a million more released under his own name.
But like Acid Mothers Temple, we've yet to be disappointed, each Baker release is fantastic, similar sounding enough to be recognizable, but varied enough to keep it interesting.
This one is another full band record, the instrumentation is guitar, bass, drums, vocals, flute, violin, with someone credited with remix, but this one is a lot different than most anything we've heard so far from Baker. This is essentially a dreamy indie rock slowcore record, with bits of production fuckery here and there, but for the most part, this is slow, lovely, melancholy, lap steel, shuffling drums, sparse reverbed guitar, and vocals, mumbled indie sad boy vocals, drawled over the lilting dreamy depressive plod. Track three is where the slowcore gets sort of smeared and smudged into more typically Baker fare, a washed out low end shimmer, guitars blurry and indistinct, feedback pulsing and shimmering. The next two tracks are more of the same, that foggy, soft focus dreamlike blur Baker is so adept at. But by track six, we're back to a loping late night wander, circular guitar figure, simple and meditative, simple jazzy drums, barely noticeable bits of woozy ambience, distant smears of high end melody, dour and gorgeously mournful. That track is moments later muted and again spread into a thick blurry abstract, a single deep cavernous drone, rumbling and reverberant, but rife with mumbled melodies and fragmented instrumental shards, barely recognizable in the swirling blackened drift.
The big surprise is the final track, a Codeine worthy slowcore crawl, this time the guitars are heavier, electric, the vocals doused in reverb and drifting ghostlike over the dirge, always threatening to explode in a burst of Nadja like metallic bliss, but never quite getting there, instead opting for soaring sublimated drama, tangled high end psychedelic melodies over a constantly shifting swirl of fuzzy guitars and buzzing ambience, and that steady simple drumming, sounding like some long lost live fuzzy and blissy Galaxie 500 jam...
Another new Aidan Baker, this one a brief 20 minute solo guitar piece, part of series of gorgeously packaged and super limited 3"cd releases on the Universal Tongue label (we got a handful of the Gnaw Their Tongues release, not enough to list, but if you want one, just ask, they probably won't last long).
Here Baker takes his electric guitar and transforms it into a soft noise generator, unleashing tranquil swells of deep dark resonant rumbles, layered and whispering softly at each other, like dangling your toes in some black sea, the soft sonics lapping at your feet. Near the halfway mark, the indistinct blurs coalesce into distinct pulses, throbbing softly in a swirl of distant buzz and dark whir, eventually spreading out again into a sprawling mass of thick viscous shimmer. Not sure what else to say. As always gorgeous and dreamy, Baker and Nadja fans will NEED this, drone obsessives will dig big time. But of course, we only got a handful, so these will no doubt be gone in a flash.
Packaged in a mini 3" dvd-style case, with full color artwork, and pressed on a black cd-r. LIMITED TO 101 COPIES!!!
It's been a (little) while since we've had some brand new Aidan Baker / Nadja for the store, thankfully this week heralds two new releases. To be reviewed next time, there's long awaited Nadja all-covers disc (which we'll tell you right now is great), and then there's this, a brand new, limited double lp from Baker solo, and as always it's a doozy, sprawling and shimmery and expansive, that sort of blissed out ambient dronemusic he does so well. But it's far from more of the same. The first track we threw on was almost jungle, with skittery beats buried beneath softly undulating layers of warm whir and deep drifts of soft swirling sound. There's also a bit of Spacemen 3 like processed psych guitar, which gives way to some buzzing raga like blur, draped over still more dreamlike dronescapes, although here, it's laced with chunks of processed alien crunch, and weird little bits of scrape and fragmented riffage.
Long stretches of underwater Oval-like wooziness, shot through with streaks of space-y effects and muted bits of glitch and buzz, some of the most washed out and wondrous space (not quite) rock ever! Warped warbly organs are stretched and smeared into warped Philip Jeck like doomy drifts, one of which is apparently a cover of Joy Division's "Twenty Four Hours", although we could only tell by the vocals, and even then, they're so hushed and barely there, that any sense of the original seems to melt into a gorgeously oozing expanse of thrum and shimmer and softly warped rumble.
Another fantastic and gorgeous and of course WAY too limited chunk of droney dreaminess from Mr. Baker. Released on the always amazing Equation Records, who really go all out with the packaging as well. Thick swirled/splattered blue vinyl, thick full color gatefold jacket, and a printed full color postcard, each of which is hand numbered, LIMITED TO 444 COPIES!
Aidan Baker is back, still vying for the most prolific man in show business award (well, at least underground, free drone show business) with a double shot of washed out dreamy droniness. There's the latest from Nadja, reflecting his more metal side, and then there's this, the follow up to last year's Pendulum, which was a fantastic slab of glistening disembodied dronemusic. Green & Gold follows suit but with an interesting twist. Vocals. Lots of 'em. Baker is no stranger to singing, his whispery croon has graced more than a few of his releases, but on G & C, the vocals are a big part of the songs, and the songs are actual songs, with drums, and verses and choruses and everything. Well, sort of.
Some tracks, like the untitled opener, are indeed still just wispy slow shifting expanses of fuzzy dreamlike sound, which we can NEVER get enough of, but others, like "Chainsaw", are actual lowercase, slow motion, dark and dolorous slowcore pop songs. Simple murky guitar riffs, wreathed of course in all manner of reverb and soft focus fuzz, hovering over stripped down shuffling rhythms, while Baker croons softly over the top, a hushed almost whisper, sounding not entirely unlike Iron & Wine's Sam Beam actually. Even the music sounds a little like a blissier tarpit version of Iron & Wine. There is some definite twang there, subtle, but it's there, nestled amidst the delicate folky strum and the glistening sonic glimmer. Imagine an even more somnambulant Low, or Spacemen 3 at 16 rpm, a ultra druggy (druggier?) Galaxie 500, each track a pop song mumbled and murky, a moonlit crawl through a hazy landscape of shuffle and shimmer, of strum and twang, all wrapped up in soft swirls of shimmer.
Essential for fans of all things Jeck and Tim Hecker and Jasper TX and Machinefabriek and Grouper and Troum and Main and the like, but also worth a listen for more adventurous fans of Iron & Wine, Spacemen 3, Galaxie 500, Low and other slowcore drugrock dreaminess...
One of our favorite Baker discs, out of print on cd-r, now repressed as a proper cd and available again, and of course packaged in one of those fancy Beta-Lactam sleeves. Plus weirdly, it's LIMITED TO ONLY 300 COPIES!! Here's what we had to say about the disc first time around:
Aidan Baker is back, still vying for the most prolific man in show business award (well, at least underground, free drone show business) with a double shot of washed out dreamy droniness. There's the latest from Nadja, reflecting his more metal side, and then there's this, the follow up to last year's Pendulum, which was a fantastic slab of glistening disembodied dronemusic. Green & Gold follows suit but with an interesting twist. Vocals. Lots of 'em. Baker is no stranger to singing, his whispery croon has graced more than a few of his releases, but on G & C, the vocals are a big part of the songs, and the songs are actual songs, with drums, and verses and choruses and everything. Well, sort of.
Some tracks, like the untitled opener, are indeed still just wispy slow shifting expanses of fuzzy dreamlike sound, which we can NEVER get enough of, but others, like "Chainsaw", are actual lowercase, slow motion, dark and dolorous slowcore pop songs. Simple murky guitar riffs, wreathed of course in all manner of reverb and soft focus fuzz, hovering over stripped down shuffling rhythms, while Baker croons softly over the top, a hushed almost whisper, sounding not entirely unlike Iron & Wine's Sam Beam actually. Even the music sounds a little like a blissier tarpit version of Iron & Wine. There is some definite twang there, subtle, but it's there, nestled amidst the delicate folky strum and the glistening sonic glimmer. Imagine an even more somnambulant Low, or Spacemen 3 at 16 rpm, a ultra druggy (druggier?) Galaxie 500, each track a pop song mumbled and murky, a moonlit crawl through a hazy landscape of shuffle and shimmer, of strum and twang, all wrapped up in soft swirls of shimmer.
Essential for fans of all things Jeck and Tim Hecker and Jasper TX and Machinefabriek and Grouper and Troum and Main and the like, but also worth a listen for more adventurous fans of Iron & Wine, Spacemen 3, Galaxie 500, Low and other slowcore drugrock dreaminess...
We're not sure how it happens really. We were joking in our review of the Nadja elsewhere on this list, that it wouldn't be an aQ list without a new Nadja. Then suddenly, we get an old Aidan Baker disc, one of our faves, reissued, then moments later, the mailman drops off another Baker disc, another reissue! So maybe we should alter our statement a bit, and say that it wouldn't be an aQ list without three or four discs by Baker/Nadja. Phew.�
We are really running out of things to say about Baker and Nadja. We definitely need someone to send us a new Nadja thesaurus. We do tend to like most everything he does. Baker has perfected a sound that definitely hits the spot, a dreamy dark droney one on his solo records, a blown out shoegazey metal one on Nadja discs. This disc originally came out as a cd-r on Public Eyesore way back in 2002, and is presented here as an actual cd, limited to 500 copies. And it's a good one.�
Back then there seemed to be a bit less space between the two sides of Baker's sonic personality. The opening and closing tracks here have doomy drums, everything bathed in a washed out woozy, glitchy and crackly, squiggly little effects, like it was some old old recording, moody and swoonsome and haunting, not really heavy, but more dense than most of Baker's more ethereal solo recordings.�
Between these sonic bookends, lie 3 tracks, 35 minutes of deep drifting tranquility, muted guitar strum, some distant drones, bits of glitch and hum, a stretch of shuffling jazzy drumming, and weirdly enough, some strange vocal samples.�
Obviously if you're a fan, and don't have this, or have the cd-r and want to upgrade, you'll definitely want this. And Baker newbies, this is as good a place to start as any.
Another slab of blissed out dreaminess from AQ fave Aidan Baker. His umpteenth release this year, every single one of them fantastic. This one, titled like a Damien Hirst piece, I Will Always And Forever Hold You In My Heart And Mind, is one single 50+ minute piece, separated into 12 parts, one for each word of the title, all woven into a single expansive whole.
The opener took us right back to Oval's Diskont 94, a shuffling shimmering underwater swirl, but instead of skipping cds as source material, Baker seems to be using some sort of loping Three Mile Pilot like bass, chopped and looped and smeared over a wash of drawn out synth drones, totally tranquil and dreamlike, but with that bass, lending the track a bit of subtle forward momentum. In fact the whole disc seems to be rooted in the interplay between droning synths and that processed bass. It's a bit krautrocky at times, a little bit Popol Vuh, ambient and abstract but propulsive at the same time. Some of the tracks are more layered, with strange muted bits of percussion, or more distinct melodies (also muted), while others get more and more distorted threatening to crumble to pieces, and still others, remain austere and minimal, throwing a shimmering sonic cloak over the hypnotic circular melodies and slow shifting sonic swells.
What more to say? As always, totally beautiful and completely hypnotic. Another perfect late night soundtrack for spacing out and drifting off...
LIMITED TO ONLY 156 COPIES, so you know what that means, each hand numbered, packaged in a super elaborate die cut sleeve, with a two sided insert, the disc, and the insert all visible around the custom cut outer sleeve. quite striking.
At first we were a little put off by the idea of a double disc Aidan Baker 'greatest hits' collection. As avid readers of the list no doubt have realized, we average close to a new Baker record every two weeks. One a list! So collecting random tracks to create yet -another- release seems a bit like overkill. But as we dug deeper, we discovered that these two discs were culled from super rare and long out of print releases, spanning the years 2000 to 2007. So rare in fact that even the avid Baker / Nadja obsessives around here didn't recognize 90 percent of the releases these tracks came from. Which ultimately means that I Wish Too is essentially a whole new record, which is perfectly fine with us. The tracks are quite varied, seeing as they span almost a decade, and include vastly different instrumentation, and varying lineups, but it's all pretty great, from the delicate drift of "Element #1", not all that far removed from the Aidan Baker dreamdronedrift we know and love, to the lilting post rock chamber music of "K", with real drums, cello and violin, a dramatic Godspeed / Rachel's sort of meander, that is quite lovely, to the rumbling subterranean low end sprawl of "Merge", a deep shimmery drift that is draped with ethereal falsetto vocals, to the tribal ambience of "Calibrate" which sound a bit like a murkier Muslimgauze or a super stripped down, much dronier African Head Charge. And there's more, lots more. A glimpse at every sonic side of Baker: huge slow moving industrial whirs and glimmering abstract shimmer, stuttering looped soundscapes that sound like alien filed recordings mixed with minimal Raster-Noton jams, warm, washed out slow jam trip hop, with skittery beats over deep low end swells, and stretched out jazzy dirgescapes, shuffling drums, and muted trumpet, soft focus piano, all locked into ever expanding loops like a more abstract Necks. And that's just disc one. Just one disc! The second disc collects a whole 'nother hour+ of drones and drifts and loping meander and whirring shimmer, a pretty serious retrospective for sure.
Needless to say, Baker fanatics, even the most obsessive, will probably not have all this stuff, and newbies will definitely have lots to dig in to and discover. So once again, if your already overloaded Baker / Nadja shelf can handle the additional strain, RECOMMENDED!
Originally released as a cd-r in 2002, so limited we never managed to get ANY. So for lots of Baker fans, this will probably be your first chance to wrap your ears around Letters.
Really hard to know what to say about Baker anymore. He definitely has a sound, unlike his dirgier more metallic blissed out doom duo Nadja, his solo stuff tends toward the super minimal, the dark and droney and drifty, the hushed and shimmery, and Letters is no different. But within that somewhat well defined sound, there is in fact much variation, subtle as it may be.
On Letters, Baker offers up soft billows of sound, which are wrapped around a hushed vocals, more of a murmur actually, but instead of a drone record, it transforms the sound into some super minimal slowcore, the pop element sublimated to almost non existence, the vocal melody being the only thing keeping the track from sprawling out into abstract smears and blurs (not that we mind that either mind you). The instrumentation is simple, just guitars and cymbals, but deftly processed into something deep and sonorous, and surprisingly melodic. Streaks of high end drift in and out (guitar or falsetto vocal, it's hard to say), as the record drifts dreamily. The sound does change dramatically here and there, deep overlapping low end tones, soft squalls of spaced out effects, glimmering streaks of washed out doomic blur, stretches of almost symphonic shimmer, the guitars transformed into hushed string sections, but it all resolves in an extended outro of soft deep swells. As always, absolutely lovely.
LIMITED TO 400 COPIES!!!!
The latest from the always impressive, and always prolific Aidan Baker, who creates thick wall of sound doomgaze in the duo Nadja, and much more personal, hushed drone music under his own name, but more and more has been expanding his scope with various collaborations and large ensembles. This might be the biggest ensemble he's worked with, 8 players, all contributing vocals, three guitars, two drummers, violin and two cellos. And it does sound like what you might imagine, a sort of Aidan Baker drone record / chamber music hybrid, long languid tones, plenty of cymbal shimmer, the strings moan and sing, the sounds ebb and flow, swelling ominously, building to swirling crescendos, before slipping back into something more minimal and contemplative, "Liminoid" is split into 4 movements, and is about as close to classical music as Baker has come, at least in the first part, the second part shifts gears dramatically, transforming into something more jazzy and propulsive, a sort of krautrock thing, but with a jazzy slow shifting Necks vibe, eventually building to a dense tribal workout, before slipping into part 3, all shimmery blissy drift, soft focus and sun dappled, the drums an understated slowcore shuffle, leading up to the 15 minute final movement, where the vocalists team up for a haunting bit of choral drama, which explodes into full on free jazz freakout wall of sound, finishing off with a long form spaced out drone jam, that definitely reminds us of a super stripped down White Hills, psychedelic and washed out and very hypnotic.
The second piece, the nearly 30 minute "Lifeforms" is a smaller ensemble, Baker on guitar, with violin, cello and 'amplified metal works', the metal works had us expecting something clangy and bombastic, but instead, it's almost all warm whirling ambient shimmer, much more in keeping with Baker's solo sounds, near the end, the sounds shift, and the strings move to the fore, weaving dramatic melodies over the slow burning drone underneath, the result very cinematic. Quite nice.
Not one, but TWO new Aidan Baker releases this time around, the reissue of Nadja's out of print cd-r Bliss Torn From Emptiness, and this, an ultra limited live document, of Baker performing in Philadelphia in February of 2007.
A gorgeous set of deep dark ambient drones, minimal, ghostly, haunting, slow building, but never really reaching resolution, instead building all sorts of glorious tension, then slowly fading out again. The opener, is a slowly swirling sea of deep dark tones, almost bell like, but spread out into lugubrious melodies, softly pulsing and gently drifting. The middle two tracks are much less bass heavy, instead offering up hisses and whirs, the creepy exhalations of some old abandoned industrial wasteland, notes and tones and chimes, slowly making their way up from the abyss, through the hazy, gauzey atmosphere, indistinct and blurred, but gradually taking shape, and assembling themselves into almost-melodies.
The final and longest track, begins super spare, long tones, and single notes let loose in an expanse of soft shimmer and lots and lots of space, like someone playing a guitar, in slow motion, miles away, the sounds taking forever to reach the speakers, and once they do, they've degraded and changed, merely shadows of the original sounds they once were. But the track explodes near the end into a glorious polyphonic sonic sunburst, streaks of high end skree shot skyward, the crowd bathed in the white glow of this pulsing, organic, slowly expanding sound. And with all live shows like this, the smattering of applause at the end is so surprising, like there were only maybe 20 people there (which there probably were) as the sound is so massive, it's hard not to imagine that Baker wasn't in some huge cathedral, behind a massive bank of lights and soundmakers, instead of hunched over his gear in some dingy little club.
Recorded by Scott Slimm, who runs the aRCHIVE label (as well as recording many of the live aRCHIVE releases), and gorgeously packaged in an elaborate fold over origami style cardstock sleeve, silkscreened, each one hand numbered, with a full color insert, and of course... LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES!!!
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Latest from musical polymath Aidan Baker, and by now, long time readers of the aQ list should be well aware of the scope of Baker's musical vision, solo, it ranges from deep drones to shimmery abstract jazz to hushed minimal ambience, and of course in his duo Nadja, the sound shifts from crushing slo-mo dreamgaze doom to lumbering metallic crush, with plenty of forays into more abstract minimalism. From what we'd read about this record, supposedly it found Baker expanding his seemingly boundary-free sound once again, by trying his hand at a sort of post rock, or more specifically, harnessing his incredible soundscaping skills into a slightly more song based form.
There does seem to be a bit more structure, but really, it's only a bit, the songs here drift and shimmer, sprawl and drift, most anchored by a minimal skeletal rhythm, but even then, the sound isn't rhythmic as much as atmospheric. The rhythm exists more as a pulse, adding to the texture more than the propulsion, at its MOST rhythmic, it adds a sort of looped mesmer, regardless, it seems that Baker can do no wrong, cuz this is a gorgeous chunk of ethereal drift.
The opening prelude is a lush, gauzy bit of piano flecked Jeck-like thrum, a warm, whirling soft focus abstract ballad, and it's yet another number that we would have been perfectly happy to see fill up the whole rest of the cd, but it is titled "Prelude" for a reason, and introduces us to the gorgeous soundworld that is Lost In The Rat Maze. We kind of expected the record to launch into something much more rocking, especially with all the talk of 'post rock', but instead, the title track unfurls dreamily like some Philip Jeck / Necks mash up, minimal and cyclical, the rhythm here more skittery and WAY abstract, wordless vocals drifting in the cloudy fuzzy mix, a definite looped feel too, the sound lush and layered, a little jazzy, but more than anything mesmerizingly dreamlike, even when guitars (recognizable ones at least) come in, they simple hover and shimmer, and add another layer of sound. And this track too, like the rest of them, could easily have been stretched out into their very own full lengths. In fact, there may not be better praise for this record than just that, the fact that this almost sounds like a collection of edits, it's not hard at all to imagine each of these tracks being their own fully contained album, but here, they're all woven into a single songsuite, the songs bleeding into one another, following an ethereal dreammusic arc, the sound shifting ever so subtly from hushed shimmer, to soft rhythmic churn and back again, all the while bathed in a haze of warm sonic hum, which gives the whole record that sort of washed out otherworldly sound we can't seem to ever get enough of. Feels foolish to proclaim every new Baker record our favorite, but we're digging this one about as much as his recent Still Life, which is saying A LOT.
We sold out of the pre-ordered super deluxe boxset version of the latest full length from dronescaper Aidan Baker, but fear not, for those of you who didn't want to shell out $52 for that deluxe edition, we've got this, the standard version, still quite swank, a deluxe black, blue and silver metallic, 6 panel digipak style sleeve, with the same amazing music at a much nicer price...
By now, long time readers of the aQ list know how much we dig Aidan Baker and all his various projects, and it seems that you all do too, based on how many of his records we sell. The sad thing is that so many of his most amazing records were released as super limited cd-r's, often so limited that we were never able to get any for the shop at all. Such was the case with 2007's Noise Of Silence. Originally released on Hyperblasted, the amazing Essence Music in Brazil has now stepped in to make this dark droney gem available again...
So what's the big deal about Noise Of Silence? Needless to say at this point, it's doozy, a gorgeous, haunting, 50 minute abstract drone/drift, super cinematic, rife with dark chordal swells, layered shimmer, mysterious disembodied voices, a strange bit of processed sibilance, that could be the vocals processed, but instead becomes weird little shards of soft focus white noise peppering the hushed soundscape, almost like the sonic equivalent of white caps on a blackened sea. It doesn't take long for the track to blossom into something far from tranquil and drifty, the sound growing more agitated, the vibe more noisy, the atmosphere more dense, the voices more strident, a swirling cacophony, that manages to build to an almost white noise squall, but even them the edges are smoothed out, and the sound, while harsh and heavy, still manages to be darkly droney and weirdly hypnotic, the sounds grinding and crunching, the various tones splintering and crumbling, a heady blown out wildly looped collage that gradually settles into something much more mellow, the last 20 minutes a slowly decaying stretch of ambient dronemusic, the whispery shadows of that cacophony still present, hissing and swirling just below the surface, seriously and surprisingly haunting and demonic Baker, we can definitely imaging this as the score for some experimental foreign horror / art film. Gorgeous stuff for sure, and definitely on the dark side of Baker's sound, one we don't get to hear as much as we'd like. Obviously WAY recommended!
There was a time not too long ago, when Aidan Baker and his various projects (Nadja, Arc) were an underground secret. Loads of super limited releases, a small but loyal following. But that is slowly beginning to change. It was unavoidable really. A quick look at Baker's website reveals the fact that there are over sixty releases, as well as a bunch of compilation appearances. And all of the ones we've heard display a deft hand at dark minimal drones, slow crushing sludge and krautrock flecked psychedelic drift (solo, Nadja and Arc respectively). Often some delirious mix of the three. On Oneiromancer, Baker flies solo, managing a small one man ensemble of electric guitar, bass guitar, tapeloops, piano, percussion, drum machine, vocals all recorded on recorded on 4-track, and woven into rumbling, cavernous dronescapes, filled with all manner of little sonic imperfections, haunting fragments of melody, noisy clatter, and ambient hiss and whir. Each track is a murky musical journey through thick washes of lowercase sound. Whether it's the subaquatic drift of the album's opener, floating weightless through a dark but sun dappled undersea world, or the conversation filled cavern of the second track, voices shimmer and echo, surrounded by soft billowing low end, and haunting footstep like click and thump. The whole record continues in the same vein, exploring lost worlds, at its darkest, Oneiromancer invokes a sense of dread, a feeling of claustrophobia, incorporating elements of industrial noise, processed vocals, creaking groaning metal and thick heavily effected guitar, at its dreamiest, it's a tranquil spacescape of soft shapes and liquid atmospheres, an eyes closed out of body sonic experience. So lovely.
Limited to 600 copies. The first 300 contain a bonus live disc, recorded live in 2005. We'll have the double disc version as long as they last. The live set, recorded using only the sound of processed guitars, is just as lovely as Oneiromancer, but a lot more shimmery and dreamlike, muted and mumbled, a truly lovely exploration into the guitar, revealing a mysterious stringed soundworld far removed from strumming and picking, a distant land of abstract beauty.
Latest from the uber prolific Aidan Baker, of mighty doomdronedirge duo Nadja, and as we've discovered in the past, Nadja is Baker's outlet for the heavier stuff, while working under his own name he tends to veer toward the minimal, ambient and drone side of the spectrum. So that's what we were sort of expecting from this, and while it definitely does lean more toward those sounds that the crush of Nadja, it's actually something else entirely, a solo acoustic record. That's right, just acoustic guitar and voice.
And Baker actually manages to pull it off. He doesn't lace his hushed abstract folk with heaving low end or thick drones, instead he weaves surprisingly lush expanses of minimal drift, and barely there strum, his voice an intimate croon, the sound dark, and doleful, melancholy and moody.
This dark hushes psychedelia stretches out over three songs and two sides, the pace glacial, the guitars buzzing and shimmering, whispery and abstract, there are occasional bits of overdubbing, but used judiciously, to create sweet vocal harmonies, or an unexpected melodic counterpoint. But no matter, the sounds always seem to shift back and settle into something barely there and dreamlike. But this is Baker after all, so on the second side he does manage to coax some buzz and drone and metallic shimmer from those steel strings, and those bits of metallic filigree simply add to the already rich, lush sound, and offer more texture, and another layer of sound to interact with the subtle strum and mumbled croon. Really nice.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! Incredibly elaborate packaging too, a striking letter pressed inner sleeve, displayed through a die cut, origami style fold over outer sleeve. Wow.
Another fantastic release from Aidan Baker, who when he's not making beautiful sounds on his own also spends time making beautiful sounds in the groups Nadja and Arc.
Soundmaking and creating music has to be as compelling and interesting for the maker as it is for the listener, especially when it's improvised music. Often the process is as important as the resulting sounds, even if the listener has no idea what is involved. But often as a listener, it's pretty exciting to know just how the sounds were created. For Pendulum, Baker recorded an electric guitar in a single take, doubled it, and then reversed the double. That probably makes more sense to you guitar / tech nerds out there, but it is cool to think about the path the sounds here took from the guitar to our ears.
Listening to this, it's difficult to pick out actual guitars, although they do surface here and there. Instead Pendulum is a smeared soundscape of blurry sounds. A wide open expanse of slowly moving tonal colors, drifting by one another, occasionally mixing together, forming new colors. Muted and understated, a twilit soundscape of churning low end and glistening high end, mixing together and forming all sorts of subtle sonic shadings. Subtlely melodic, a gorgeous deep droning drift, another one of those records destined to find a permanent home in the late night listening pile. So gorgeous.
Aidan Baker is a very busy man. Not only is he a writer, he also plays music under no less than three monickers. His drone metal outfit Nadja, his avant prog experimental group ARC, and of course his solo work under his own name. Elsewhere on this week's list you'll find two other releases from Nadja, big beautiful lumbering slabs of slow motion sound, but here, on his latest solo endeavor, it's an entirely different situation. Gone are the beats and the downtuned guitars, the sludge, the doom, the dirge, leaving nothing but the drone. And even that is practically washed out into nothingness. Periodic is very subtle and quiet, ultra minimal drifts of microscopic sound. A few spikes pop up here and there, but for the most part it's a near flatline, a barely there wash of creaks and shimmers, whirs and rumbles, totally abstract soundscapes that require active listening to full grasp. Headphones transport the listener to another world. Under the sea, in some lost cave, floating in space, hard to tell exactly where you are with a head full of these sounds, which is why Baker is so good. Eyes closed, ears full, we are drifting lost in some parallel universe, where everything is tiny, a world of slowly shifting little pixels, or a world where everything is massive, so all we see are huge expanses of color and shape. So mysteriously dreamy. And of course highly recommended.
Packaged in a gorgeous oversized blue and white sleeve adorned with billowing clouds and (of course) the periodic table.
Usually, on Aidan Baker's solo records, the list of instruments almost doesn't matter in terms of the actual music. Voice, flute, whatever, Baker tends to smear and blur all of the various pieces into one fluid and gently flowing organic whole. Even in Nadja, his doom metal duo, the guitars are rendered fairly un-guitar like. Instead, the riffs are delivered as huge swaths of molten granulated sound. On Scalpel, his latest solo record, guitar is again the main instrument, but unlike most of the time with Baker, you can actually hear the guitar, and it sounds, well, like a guitar. In fact the first two tracks, the shortest of the five, sound almost like pure folk music, albeit a dark and minimal and lugubrious folk. The guitars wispy and ethereal, chords gently strummed, melodies softly fingerpicked, Baker's voice a gruff whisper. Quite lovely, but surprisingly straight ahead, reminding us of Loren Connors or Hisato Higuchi, a dark languorous folky shimmer, the only hint of Baker's penchant for sound processing, at least in the first two songs is the blur of shortwave interference separating the tracks, a woman's voice, hissy white noise, but it quickly subsides and the sound dials back down to a dreamlike crawl.
The last three tracks, all well over 10 minutes, seem to have the same root, that soft shimmery folk, but here's where Baker's deft hand and soundscaping and sound processing finally surfaces. "Our Needs Bear No Relation To Our Desires" is a slow gentle strum, the various overtones gradually building into moody swells, eventually joined by bits of textural grit, muted buzz, what almost sounds like field recordings, but it's all very subtle, the focal point still that lonely minor key melody, marching resolutely forward through a fuggy dreamlike haze. "Indifference" also begins with a lilting folksy strum, but is also soon nearly subsumed by dizzying whirls of sound, subtle backwards sonic swoops, fuzzy smears of effects, turning that heart of folk into something much more glimmering and glittering. And finally, "Drawn Like A Moth, Slip Like A Snail", returns, mostly, to the unadorned folk of the opening two tracks, another gorgeously drawled, barely audible vocal line, and a lovely main melody, but for its entire 11+ minutes, the guitar and vocal lines drift in an gauzy expanse of humid minimal whir and soft focus high end flutter, various bits of vocal flecked with FX and occasional bits of backwards blur.
Yet another beautiful Aidan Baker disc, and while this one will of course appeal to the Baker / Nadja faithful, it just might hit the spot for dark freek folk fans as well�
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!! Each one hand numbered. Gorgeously packaged, fold over die cut sleeve, silver metallic ink on maroon textured paper, a black and white insert / cover image visible through the diecut.
Originally released (albeit only digitally) in 2005, Songs Of Flowers & Skin reveals a side of Aidan Baker we love, but only rarely get to see, and it's his slowcore side, channeling the spirit of groups like Codeine and Bedhead and Seam, creating dark, drifting slow motion pop songs, that creep and crawl and unfurl gorgeously and gradually. Like we said, those moments do surface in his discography, especially solo, where he seems more inclined to introspection and less to doomgaze, but this record offers up a whole disc of proper songs, slow, languorous, dark, haunting, melancholy songs, with singing and lyrics and proper rock band instrumentation, augmented by trumpet and violin, it's really quite lovely.
The record opens with "Skin Like Sand", a serpentine guitar figure wraps around simple minimal skeletal drumming, vocals are crooned softly, actually sung, but this IS Aidan Baker, so it's not nearly that simple, the track is laced with bits of glitch, streaks of crackle, and the vocals are strangely processed, so in the background, little vocal snippets echo the main voice, making it sound ghostly and dreamlike. The next few tracks get almost jazzy sounding, upping the tempo a bit, but keeping the mood dour and depressive, "Dance Dance Dance" is a smoky trumpet flecked ballad, all reverbed guitar and sizzling cymbals, "Second Selves" sounds almost Spanish, a little bit of a Morricone vibe, a regal almost march, the horns and strings, sweeping and dramatic, very cinematic, "Take Me Out Of My" is another skittery slow groove, that sounds almost like it could be American Music Club, if it weren't for the strange static and whirling organ drones.
Almost the entire second half of the disc is taken up by the nearly half hour long "Flowerskin" (although some of that is silence hiding a secret track, more on that in a second), begins as a slowly building driftscape of long tones, mysterious electronic glitches and truncated rhythms, before the song proper kicks in, another brooding meander, the glitch and crackle and hiss even more pronounced here, sometimes almost blotting out the song completely, there is an almost Nadja worthy climax, but it's more soft focus and subdued, a swirling cloud of warm washed out drones and tangled streaks of buzz, before sputtering out and leaving nothing but silence. Which is eventually supplanted by a gorgeously dark and melancholy dirge folk ballad, just acoustic guitar and vocals, hushed and haunting and quite beautiful.
Maybe not for the Nadja doombliss dronemetal obsessives, but fans of past AB solo outings, as well as anyone into dark, intimate, minimal slowcore and dark brooding doom pop, will definitely want to check this out.
The latest of a seemingly endless onslaught of Aidan Baker solo releases (we're not complaining, just a bit overwhelmed!) comes in the form of this extremely limited cassette, released by our pal Jon who runs Anthem Records up in Portland, and it's another good one, keeping stylistically with most of Baker's recent solo records, it finds him conjuring up a dark jazz, but this time, at least on the opener, that swirling Necks like moodiness is tethered to some seriously propulsive rhythms. "Paperhouses" sounds like a krautrock Necks, the tempo locked in at a pretty good clip, driving through clouds of deep thrum and warm whirling shimmer, hazy and haunting and dreamlike, and minus that rhythm, we'd be in pure ambient bliss out mode, but that rhythm changes everything. But then things quickly settle down on the second track, the tempo dialed back down, the track a jazzy dirge, but then something strange happens, the rhythm gets all busy and skittery, and we realize that it's sort of jungly, which is weird, and cool. It never gets full on jungle, but definitely an interesting variation. And one that seems to pop up subtly throughout the rest of the record. Which unwinds similarly, dark, and droney, jazzy and minimal, lots of long tones, layered and slowly drifting, laced with metallic swells and soft focus squalls of sound, but ultimately darkly dirgey and dreamily doomy, the final track, bookending the record by returning to the ramped up rhythm of the opener, again transforming into some darkjazz krautrock, this time the surrounding sounds building to something almost shoegazey, but still dolorously muted and murky. Fans of any of the other recent Baker solo records will for sure dig, and we actually are thinking this might be one of our favorites of the bunch...
While they last, we have the special Record Store Day version! Includes a download code!
Seems like the constant supply of Nadja / Aidan Baker releases has slowed down a bit. There was a time when a week wouldn't go by without a new releases from one or both. But if fewer releases means more like this new solo record, we're perfectly happy with the trade off.
As most Baker/Nadja fans know, Nadja records tend toward the bombastic and the metalgaze, seeing as that's what the duo is all about, but Baker's solo records are where he really gets to experiment. In the beginning it was mostly like a more minimal version of Nadja, the same sort of droned out drift, just with the volume and heft dialed way back. But then Baker began trying out new sounds, varied approaches, with different instrumentation, which brings us to Still Life, which just might be the prettiest, and maybe even best, solo record we've heard from Baker yet. Ostensibly his 'jazz' record, recorded using just piano, drums and upright bass, but this isn't like JAZZ jazz, this is like Necks jazz, droney and minimal, slow building and hypnotic, and Baker adds cool bits of weird production which only enhances the sound. Four loooong tracks, each one a dark miniature epic, the bass muted and minimal, the drums more like the skitter and sizzle of cymbals, while the piano plucks out the melancholic minor key melody, a repeated motif, that unfurls like a slowly mutating loop, it's not until about 9 minutes in that the rest of the drum kit comes into play, and even then it's just some barely there snare skitter, and the melody is wrapped in cool swooping effects, very subtle, but it makes the notes sound like they're swooping in. The first track leads directly into the second, almost as if they were two parts of a single song, this part though is even more spare, the chords on the piano, separated by long expanses of minimal drum shuffle and the slow decay of the bass. This track eventually builds a bit of momentum, the drums subtly more driving, the sound a woozy, mournful lope, definitely falling within the realms of 'doom jazz', Baker surprisingly adept on the kit, playing the rims, and unfurling busy little flurries, that manage to add texture without being distracting, and much like the first song, you never really want it to end.
Track three begins with a flurry of piano notes, all upper register, flecked with the occasional bass pulse, the piano getting more and more blurry, Baker subtly affecting the notes, blurring them, smearing them, transforming them into a sort of Lubomyr Melnyk style shimmer, all the while Baker underpins the proceedings with the wood-on-wood click and clatter of stick on drum shell, and at about 7 minutes in, the song shifts, and the low end swoops in, the drums coalesce into a proper rhythm, and the song becomes an ominous creep, all the while that initial flurry of piano plays on in the background, the vibe dark and drowsy and late night, the low end thrum and drums eventually fade out, leaving the song to end how it began with a swirling cloud of tinkling notes on the piano.
And finally, the record finishes off with another stretched out sprawl of hazy, droney hypno-jazz, again the piano offering melody and color, while the bass thrums and rumbles, and Baker keep simple time with stick on shell again, and so it goes, for nearly 14 minutes, an epic haunting minimal drone jazz drift equal parts the Necks, Bohren and Circle at their most murky and minimal. Gorgeous, haunting, beautiful stuff.
Fans of the Necks will definitely want this, as will anyone into dark, brooding minimalism and abstract doom jazz drift.
We've joked in the past about Baker and his seemingly inexhaustible output. But we are always quick to point out that we absolutely never ever wish it to stop. Thankfully there seems to be no possibility of that happening anytime soon. The Sea Swells A Bit, released on Italian label A Silent Place, finds Baker musically moody and contemplative, as we've come to expect from records he releases under his own name. The ingredients are similar to those employed in his other projects, bass, guitars, tape loops, drum machines, but here those instruments are not so much played as, turned on and set free. There are riffs, and vocals, but in the opening track, those elements are so soft and airy, you have to listen close to distinguish where one ends and the other begins. Like laying on the ocean floor listening to M83 jamming inside a bathysphere half way to the surface. Murky and mumbly and underwater sounding. Which ties in with the album's title, song titles, and what might in fact be the sonic theme. The drum machine is in there too, but it sounds more like bits of static than any sort of rhythm. But it hardly matters, all the rhythm you need, a sort of barely there primal pulse, is in the drifting disembodied riffs.
The second track is a little bit more structured, the dreamlike murk of the opening track is still present, and is buried beneath even more layers of sonic silt and shimmering swells, the rhythm floats to the surface though, and almost jazzy krautrock groove, loping and propulsive, almost like an old Circle record dosed with thorazine and left in the sun too long, blown out, blurry, blissy, but still shuffling into the light.
The final track is another rhythm driven drone rocker (although it doesn't really 'rock' as such). Thick cottony swells of gentle buzz and swaying swells of warm whir beneath languorous ambling percussion. A lazy hazy slowed down spacerock dirge. Like a Spacemen 3 forty-five played at 16 rpm, druggy and deliriously dreamlike.
Packaged in a nice thick, super swank, textured and lacquered cardstock sleeve.
The latest from the super prolific Aidan Baker, who is one half of aQ doomdronedirge faves Nadja, not to mention responsible for about a million solo records we love, comes in the form of this sprawling, epic double disc set, featuring no less than ninety eight songs, ranging in length from six seconds to seven minutes, over two hours of music, and all designed to be played in SHUFFLE mode, producing a unique combination, and essentially a new record, with every listen. Similar in form to his collaboration with Tim Hecker, Fantasma Parastasie, which while we don't think was meant to be played in shuffle mode, was also divided into lots of super short tracks.
And while this one IS designed for shuffle play, the songs themselves, when listened to in proper order, are in fact proper songs. And for the purpose of reviewing, it might make more sense to describe the songs, and then maybe what it's like when they become all jumbled up. It's actually a super varied collection of songs and sounds, that seem to draw on every facet of Baker's considerably all over the map discography, from skittery abstract jazz, to almost Torche like sludge pop, to glitched out psychedelic skitter (and that's all actually in the same 'song'!), from groovy, almost hip hop sounding beat heavy shuffle, to mathy sort-of noise rock, to blackened doomy dirges, from abstract gristly droney drift to woozy krautrocky psych, to IDM like programmed electronica, to dense metalgaze drift, and from meandery post rock to murky downtempo groove, and on and on and on. The two discs are appropriately labeled ADD and OCD, definitely referencing the constant flitting from sound to sound and track to track, even more so once things are set to shuffle.
One interesting element is that there are loads of different drummers, Mac McNeilly from Jesus Lizard, Steven Hess from Locrian, and Ted Parsons from Swans and Prong, just to name a few, and it's pretty fun to hear Baker collaborate, and it does definitely speak to there being so many disparate sounds.
As for the whole shuffle thing, we tried it a bunch of different times, and it definitely get seriously OCD / ADD, the fragments very abrupt and jagged, and not necessarily flowing the way say a serious of swooshy shimmery drones might, and while it's definitely interesting, and it almost forces your brain to understand the segues, even if they don't seem to make sense, which definitely adds a cool element to the proceedings, although to be totally honest, we find ourselves digging it a lot more UNshuffled.
Cool packaging too with some super striking comic style cover art.
If he wanted, Aidan Baker could cruise along making the same record over and over, but a restless musical soul this man must have as even successive releases by his various projects tend to diverge greatly from their various sounds. While Nadja tends to be the most sonically consistent project, existing in the nether gloom of black ambient dream doom or whatever we feel like calling it, his work under his own name has shown the most breadth, veering from clattery noisy experimentation, to ultra minimal drone, to strange collaged jazzscapes, to dreamy slowcore, and one and on...
For Thoughtspan, Baker handles the guitars, drums, bass and vocals, with some help on live drums, violin and trumpet, to weave a gorgeously expansive soundscape of laid back, shuffling yet propulsive, krautrocky jazz. Dark and smoky, dreamy and smoldering, the closest sonic comparison might be the Necks, but where the Necks lock into extended cyclical grooves, Thoughtspan plays more like a 'rock' band, albeit a looped, mesmeric one, locked into a seemingly never ending groove, but as the record progresses the music begins to�gradually crumble, becoming more and more distorted, everything slowly collapsing inward, the scraping of a violin heralding the shift, as any 'rock' is rent asunder, and all that is left is a strange whirring, creaking ambient dronescape. And that's just the first track, although it is 22+ minutes...
The second track, another long one, begins with strange buzzes and metallic shimmers, a very percussive soundfield, peppered with backwards sonic swoops and buzzing steel strings, eventually the drums kick in, and the band is loping into some dense reverbed jam, the buzzing strings stretched out over the propulsive rhythmic framework, eventually fading back into the backwards droning buzz of the first few minutes.�
Finally, the final 16 minute track, finds Baker creating a strange wide open expanse, distant drones and all sorts of strange muted melodies, with moaned, barely decipherable vocals, and in the middle of it all, a drummer, playing on the rims and the floor and on wood and metal as much as on the kit, the whole vibe is very abstract and freak folk, it's not difficult to hear some Avarus or one of those tribal outfits, but unlike those folky forest dwellers, Baker begins to gradually affect the sounds here, smearing everything into warm droning swells and jagged streaks of resonant buzz, beneath which the drums lock into a staggering sort of midtempo lope, it's dirge-y and dramatic, but still sort of blown out and ambient, before finishing off with a burst of blinding distorted radiance.�
Packaged in a mini, plastic dvd style case, full color artwork and full color photographic inserts.�
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!
Another new Aidan Baker record, another new collection of soft sonorous ambience (as opposed to another new Nadja record, another collection of crushing fuzzy blissed out doom), either way, this guy continues forward with the latest in his seemingly never ending, near monthly release schedule, and assuming one has the dough and the diligence to keep up, one shall continue to be rewarded in gorgeous sonic shimmer and whispery blurred ambience.
This newest release is a collaboration with Beta Cloud, whom we had never heard of until now, and while we don't know what BC sounds like on his own, he does seem a perfect match for Mr. Baker. The instrumentation is quite strange, Baker on flute, Beta Cloud aka Carl Pace on trumpet, synth and guitar, but you might now know it from the sound. Present of course are the thick clouds of ambient blur, the soft flurries of smeared distortion, and the slow shifting slabs of staticky whir, but on the first track of An Open Letter, there is a haunting melodic component, spare piano like melodies, drifting sprite like above the low end swirl, very hypnotic and almost new age-y sounding (in a good way), the notes wreathed in reverb and sent rippling into the ether, very reminiscent of Ambient Eno for sure, but with a much darker edge. Everything cloudy and grey, soft edged buzzing smoother into shimmering swells.
The other three tracks (all four tracks are loooooong) aren't quite as ambient and blissful, instead, they roil and seethe, like the sea beneath an impending storm, still dark and soothing, but pregnant with a subtle malevolence, laced with melodic fragments and strange sonic shards. There are a few moments, where the intensity builds to a fever pitch, causing us to briefly wonder if we hadn't accidentally thrown on a Nadja record instead, and here and there, the sound thickens into deeply resonant chordal washes or slips into what sounds like thick streaks of bristly solar flare guitar feedback, but always seems to settle back into a much more subdued, almost hushed drift, albeit one with an ominous edge, a brooding sonic intensity, always just below the surface...
Another killer release From Universal Tongue, and the first Aidan Baker / Nadja release in THREE New Arrivals lists! That might be a record, hope nobody was going through withdrawals! And fear not, we should be back on our biweekly schedule of Nadja and/or Baker releases, we'll have the Nadja collaboration with Pyramids on the next list, and now, we have this super limited Aidan Baker jam, another collaboration, this one with drummer Brandon Valdivia, a way spacier jazzier direction that most of what we've heard from Baker, but still blissed out and dreamy enough to appeal to folks who dig the usual Baker action.
The drums here shuffle and skitter, lots of sizzling cymbals, the guitars moan, the thrum, drift and shimmer, the single minute track here, recorded live in 2008 at a festival in Germany, twists and turns, going from minimal bliss out, to gnarled jazzy crunch, to moaning abstract drift to heavy avant pound. Cool stuff for sure.
This one is a proper cd, NOT a cd-r, but still limited to only 323 copies. Like the other UT releases, packaged in a cool 5" mini dvd case, with a full color cover/insert, with artwork by Mories aka Gnaw Their Tongues!!
The latest in the long running Latitudes series comes from long time aQ fave Aidan Baker, who is one of the few artists to make more than one Latitudes appearance (the last time was the album Sky Burial, with his doomgaze duo Nadja). For the oddly named Glass Crocodile Medicine, Baker hauled in his UK tour mates the Plurals, and they lay down two sprawling slow burn epics, the first a 20+ minute haze of long tones and muted shimmer. It's a lot like some of the other recent, jazzier Baker solo records, but with the jazziness mostly removed, leaving just lush billowing shadows of sound, loose softly swirling tangles of bleary chordal thrum draped over tinkling melodies hovering just below the surface. The song spends it's first 7 or 8 minutes slowly fading in, but once it gets its footing, it unfolds dreamily, modern minimalism woven into haunting hushed cinematic drift, hints of Stars Of The Lid abound, another group who routinely traffic in such sounds. Soon the sonic surface begins to roil, arcs of tonal color leaping over increasingly urgent strumming, the vibe becoming almost weirdly neo-folk at one point, but still wreathed in what now sounds like some mysterious processed cloud of choral shimmer. But for the last few minutes, it's that darkly strummed steel string buzz that is the focus, the surrounding sounds whipped into a frenzy of washed out sonic blur and dense muted howl, eventually disappearing in mesmerizing slow fade squall of looped distorted buzz.
The second track is a bit more propulsive, but only a bit, with a drowsy, woozy bassline, drifting through a field of disembodied voices, and some of that psychedelic swirl from the first track, not to mention all manner of random clatter and crunch, but that bassline, lends the track some gorgeously dark momentum, transforming what might have been another ambient epic into a darkly gloomy slo-mo groove, a haunting gothic dirge, rendered in smeared blacks and greys, sounding like at any point it could explode into full on lumbering heaviness, but instead, it broods and pulses ominously, indeed building to something more, but more blissed out and noisy, the low end seeming to dissipate as other sound swoop in and wrap that loping bass groove in sheets of hazy hiss and hum, wild whorls of psych guitar noise, and sculpted white noise crunch, all wrapped in a heady, hypnotic feedback melody that undulates hypnotically throughout, the whole thing totally tranced out and woozily mesmeric.
Packaged like all Latitudes releases in that distinctive white and brown sleeve, both the cd and lp bearing a cool purple metallic sigil, the cd folding out origami style revealing a small printed insert, the lp fantastically diecut, and containing the same insert. Both LIMITED TO 500 COPIES and hand numbered!!
Long overdue rematch between Mr. Aidan Baker, who is as you probably know also of Nadja, and Thisquietarmy, whose previous collaboration, Orange, cause quite a stir around here. And it still gets a lot of play at home, it's the perfect hazy moonlight drifting off to never never land sort of dreamy drone record. Almost like M83 with everything removed but that glorious soft buzz. Sorry if you missed out that one, it was limited to 200 copies and is long gone, but the good news is, that A Picture Of A Picture sounds like it could be part two. In fact it sounds like it could very well have been culled from the same sessions that produced Orange.
Four long long tracks, each a slow swirling amorphous cloud of gauzy half melodies and thick layered textures, the sound slips from gritty and pixilated, to glistening and soft focus in a heartbeat. These two soundscapers are a fantastic match, it's really impossible to tell who's doing what, and where the work of one ends and the other begins, and it hardly matters, as the two together have created something ethereal and ephemeral, a sun dappled drift, equal parts minimal new age hush, and warm languid dreamdrone shimmer. A few moments find the duo ramping it up, but even then, it's only loud or heavy or intense, relative to the rest of this record, which does in fact spend most of its time hovering, whispering, floating lazing, gradually changing color and shape, it's the musical version of watching clouds drift across a brilliant blue sky, so tranquil and mesmerizing and meditative, even the occasional storm cloud, only serves to infuse the afternoon's siesta with some greys and browns, which perfectly balance the rest of the record's endlessly prismatic palette. So gorgeous. Definitely a new nighttime sonic soporific. Released on Killer Pimp, who also released the Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words cd, reviewed elsewhere on this week's list (psst... it's one of the Records Of The Week!).
Expectations were pretty high for this one. Two long time aQ favorites, both with similar yet distinctive sounds, but with incredibly different bodies of work. Aidan Baker, who releases records a mile a minute, averaging 1 or 2 a month, thankfully managing to hit the bullseye almost every time. And Tim Hecker, who has produced 5 or 6 full lengths in as many years, every one practically perfect. Both Baker and Hecker explore similar sonic spectrums, utilizing fuzz and buzz and shimmer, Baker taking it a step further with his doom duo Nadja, taking the lurch and lumber of the genre and adding swirls of gauze and haze and bliss, while solo, he tends toward the more ambient and abstract. Hecker on the other hand takes what appears to be pop music and subverts it, sublimates it, pulls it apart and recontextualizes the sound, which usually involves wrapping everything in washed out whirs and blurred hiss, and all manner of glitch and crackle, like listening to music through headphones made out of steel wool and insulation. But with two such strong sonic personalities, the potential for this collaboration to be a bit of a mess was fairly high, and then of course there was also the possibility that each would just do their own thing, allowing the other to add bits here and there. But somehow, the sounds on Fantasma Parastasie manage to transcend, allowing glimpses of familiar sounds, hints of each artist's own work, but woven into a whole that is unto itself, a gloriously abstract swirl of sound, longform landscapes of bliss and blur, of buzz and even roar, extended movements, in which the various elements drift and shimmer, overlap and intertwine, melodies and songcraft meet texture and soundscapery, guitars unfurl tangled melodies one second, bleary eyed chordal blurs the next, harmonics glisten and hover amidst deep soft swells, distortion and buzz build into fierce walls of blown out psychedelia, the sounds crumbling and decaying before our ears, threatening to collapse, and in this fragile state lies the beauty of those sounds, effulgent, incandescent, but at the same time, blackening, beginning some unnamable process of inevitable decay. And eventually it does decay, those thick roiling sounds dissipate, leaving something soft and shimmery, glistening on a bed of shed buzz and crumbled crush, floating heavenward, its notes and melodies catching the sunlight, and offering up prismatic reflections.
The strange thing about this record is that each song is separated into super short pieces, eleven in most cases, each part between 15 and 45 seconds (it's obviously much more noticeable on the cd). We tried listening to it on shuffle, presuming that was perhaps the intention, and while it still sounds cool, it was a bit too and took too much away from the overall effect. Instead, the various parts, played in order, slip seamlessly into one another, so much so that if you weren't watching the tracks tick by on player, you wouldn't even notice.
The two work amazingly well together, bits of guitar, fragments of riffs, looped and repeated, swathed in thick smears of digital crunch, of buzzing rumble, much of the record sounds like a heavier William Basinski, as if the two were experimenting with they own Disintegration Loops. A few of the tracks are quite tranquil, abstract and minimal, but for the most part, Baker and Hecker seem more interested in distressed sounds, in distortion, in pushing the limits, composing in the red, needles pegged, but taking what in other hands could be harsh and abrasive, and crafting those sounds into something simultaneously soft and dreamlike. Even the various movements, drift smoothly into one another the entire record almost like a single piece, expansive and varied and sprawling, epic and majestic, but inward looking, introspective, melancholy, imbuing the crumbling crunch and blown out minimalism, with emotion, with distinctive mood, at once dark and mysterious, but also strangely hopeful.
The album closer and title track, is the only one not split up into movements, and is easily the most abstract, the most minimal, a stretch of lugubrious low end, so soft, so weightless, a hushed musical murmur, no distortion, no buzz, just a simple swell and sway, drifting fading, and finally disappearing.
Absolutely breathtaking.
By now, long time readers of the aQ list know how much we dig Aidan Baker and all his various projects, and it seems that you all do too, based on how many of his records we sell. The sad thing is that so many of his most amazing records were released as super limited cd-r's, often so limited that we were never able to get any for the shop at all. Such was the case with 2007's Noise Of Silence. Originally released on Hyperblasted, the amazing Essence Music in Brazil has stepped into re-release it, and as with all their releases, they've pulled out all the stops. This is in fact a PRE-ORDER!! For the super deluxe, boxset version of Baker's reissued Noise Of Silence. We will have the regular single cd non-boxset version, but this right here, this is for the Baker obsessives, like us, like YOU, limited to 122 copies, almost entirely sold out from the label, Essence has graciously set aside about 20 boxes, the LAST 20, for aQ customers, so if you want one, order it now, we'll get them in sometime in the next few weeks, and they can either ship with your current order, or on their own. You will be charged for the box now, but then the shipping will be sorted out when we actually send the box (and it'll ship by weight, not as 1 item).
So what's the big deal about Noise Of Silence. And this fancy box? Well, more on the packaging (and the bonus cd-r) further down, but Noise of Silence, is a doozy, a gorgeous, haunting, 50 minute abstract drone/drift, super cinematic, rife with dark chordal swells, layered shimmer, mysterious disembodied voices, a strange bit of processed sibilance, that could be the vocals processed, but instead becomes weird little shards of soft focus white noise peppering the hushed soundscape, almost like the sonic equivalent of white caps on a blackened sea. It doesn't take long for the track to blossom into something far from tranquil and drifty, the sound growing more agitated, the vibe more noisy, the atmosphere more dense, the voices more strident, a swirling cacophony, that manages to build to an almost white noise squall, but even them the edges are smoothed out, and the sound, while harsh and heavy, still manages to be darkly droney and weirdly hypnotic, the sounds grinding and crunching, the various tones splintering and crumbling, a heady blown out wildly looped collage that gradually settles into something much more mellow, the last 20 minutes a slowly decaying stretch of ambient dronemusic, the whispery shadows of that cacophony still present, hissing and swirling just below the surface, seriously and surprisingly haunting and demonic Baker, we can definitely imaging this as the score for some experimental foreign horror / art film. Gorgeous stuff for sure, but definitely on the dark side of Baker's sound, a side we don't get to her so much any more.
This new version of Noise Of Silence, is presented as a super deluxe, hand made and hand assembled box, painted in blacks and blues, nicely textured, with what appears to be branches or veins, inside the cd is housed in a gorgeous full color digipak, and held in place by black elastic bands, while right next to it, unfold black triangular flaps, and pull out the accordion like set of cards, each one hand painted like the outside of the box, all unique and surprisingly tactile, to reveal the bonus cd-r, a collection of early works and demos, many of which would in fact show up on later releases in altered forms, all culled from the period spanning 1991-1995, and an eclectic collection of early works, that tend toward the raw, the noisy, the aggressive, but still beautiful and lush and droney, some acoustic ballads, some droned out noisescapes, some hushed minimal acoustic drift as well as some darkly psychedelic and dreamy guitar ragas, incredible stuff for sure, and well worth a proper release on their own, but ONLY available as part of this super limited box.
As we mentioned above, we'll be able to get about 20 copies of this box, and that's IT. So if you want one, order it now. We'll charge you and let you know when it arrives. If you're after the normal version, let us know and we can put you down for one of those, but this listing is for folks who want to nab one of these before they are gone for good.
Much like the Trinity cd we listed a while back, Trinitarian, finds the Canadian doomdronebliss duo Nadja offering up a whole lp of new material, including a solo piece by each member as well as a brand new massive sidelong dreamdirge.
Baker's contribution is a gorgeous expanse of breathless shimmer, all billowy and dreamlike, soft swirls of muted chimes and bell-like tones, woven into almost choral sounding passages, warm and hushed and reverent, but with a slightly ominous tinge that only grows more pronounced as the track progresses.
Buckareff balances Baker's more tranquil contribution, with a piece much more sinister, a deep, dark and creepy soundscape of crumbling distorted buzz and shimmering metallic whir, lots and lots of space creating a bottomless black ambience rife with minor key melodic fragments and undulating layers of textured drone. Intense and intensely haunting.
The Nadja track takes up all of side 2, and begins with blissed out harmonized guitars, super spare drums, a digitally treated, slightly glitchy soft minimalism that drifts delicately until the inevitable crush, but this time the crush is not only massive, it's weirdly warped and warm and soft, processed and distorted making it sound a bit alien and otherworldly, almost more warm and washed out than heavy, a bit like a doom metal Galaxie 500, sun dappled and multihued, dreamy and ethereal, while somehow managing to remain incredibly heavy. The song grows slightly less blissy and more intense and ominous by the end of the side, but even then, the sound is still mysteriously transcendent.
LIMITED TO ONLY 200 COPIES!!! These are probably the only copies we'll ever get!
You read that right, this is indeed another new Nadja AND another new Aidan Baker, at the same time! Even after the world record FIVE Nadja's on a recent list. And while we joke about how prolific this guy is, even we're a bit overwhelmed by what is basically, counting reissues, maybe the 10th or 11th new release in a matter of a month or two. Sure we can whip out reviews like nobody's business, but even we're run a little ragged. But we'll do our best.
Obviously fans will need this, lots of us bought copies, after all, we've yet to hear a bad record from Baker or Nadja, and this one is no different. However it is special for two reasons, one, it's crazy limited, only 500 copies, hand numbered. When we run out of the ones we have it will be gone for good. And two, it features the first (as far as we know) solo jam from the non Aidan Baker half of Nadja, Leah Buckareff.
Three long tracks, released to coincide with a German live performance in April. The Baker solo track is a pretty glistening drift, a bit more dense and thick than past solo efforts, a surprisingly busy sonic swirl, ethereal effects, murky drones, fragments of melodies, bits of feedback and rumble and twinkle, all set in a warm whirring expanse of soft sound.
The Nadja track begins all dark and serene, but quickly builds to an incendiary blown out doom trudge, quite possibly the heaviest and most distorted we've heard the duo, the guitar thick and crumbling and so distorted it almost obscures any melody, the drum machine a chaotic splatter, the last few minutes so intense and heavy and freaked out, the squall of swirling black psych and drum machine sputter almost completely obscures the churning riffage below.
The big surprise here, although we suppose it shouldn't really be a surprise, is Buckareff's contribution. We're tempted to suggest that she start releasing her own records, but that's just what we need! More kick ass records to buy. Anyway, Buckareff's track, is all low end whir, whispery static, and barely there percussion, that builds to a caustic dirgedrone as heavy and intense as anything Nadja has released, but the cool thing is that even when the sound is a wall of heaving roiling black buzz, beneath it lurks that opening bass melody, the strange pit pat percussion, a mournful lope, slowly being swallowed by a massive swell of muted murky washed out heaviness, that quickly fades out, leaving that minimal bassy shuffle to fade out into silence.
Ok, fine, fuck it, bring it on, more Buckareff solo stuff! We can take it. Even if we can't afford more musical obsessions. But after this we need to hear more. Once again, three for three. Nadja, Baker, Buckareff, essential listening for the doomdronedirge inclined.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, hand numbered, in a cool matte paper fold over sleeve.
A pretty perfect matchup, Aidan Baker, 1/2 of doom drone duo Nadja, and avant-drone guitarist / filmmaker Sarah Lipstate aka Noveller, who both offer up some of their prettiest sounds for this collection of Colorful Disturbances.
Lipstate starts things off with a gorgeous smoldering driftscape, a sea of tinkling chiming high end melodies draped over soft swells of buzz and crunch, while within a pulsing blur holds it all together. Dreamy and divine, definitely the sort of track that could have been double or triple the length. Her second contribution is just as good, a bit more minimal, slightly glitchier and buzzier, but still serene and dreamlike, with a slightly ominous vibe, reverbed guitars are left to float in a constantly swirling cloud of sonic grit and soft focus hiss, that hiss constantly changing shapes and revealing partially obscured sounds and voices and melodies. So nice, this too could have filled up the whole side and we would have been perfectly happy.
Baker contributes a single 20 minute sidelong drift, all washed out glimmery tones, long and blurred and smeary and indistinct, creating a slow shifting layered landscape of gauzy soft focus colors, sun dappled and prismatic, warm and muted and totally lovely. Easily one of the prettiest tracks we've heard from AB for sure. Like we said, a perfect match!
Vinyl only and limited, so grab one before they disappear...
Another super limited release from Mr. Aidan Baker, the first since, well, since the last list in fact, but as with that disc, Figures, this one too holds up just as well as any of his other numerous releases, and as usual the more we listen to it, the more we discover and dig about it. Unlike Figures, which was Baker in slowcore band mode, this is the slow languorous drone sound we originally fell in love with way back when. Orange finds Baker hooking up with another sonically like minded individual, Eric Quach, who records as Thisquietarmy. It seems both have a thing for the dark and drone-y, the lush and laid back, a world of expansive slowly shimmering deep ambience, as Orange demonstrates. Four tracks clocking in at 30 minutes, Orange is a darkly gorgeous drift in four movements, shifting lazily from dense rumbling reverberant low end explorations, to airy soft focus flutter, to lumbering slow motion whir, to subtly melodic epic cinematic ambience. It's hard to know what else to say about this stuff, other than it's gorgeous, dreamy, serene, haunting and so so so beautiful. As if there was anything else you needed to know.�
Packaged in an�orange, yellow, red and white sleeve and pressed on a cool matching silver/orange cd-r.�
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!!!
As if to make up for a relative dearth of releases from Aidan Baker over the last handful of lists, we've got two new ones this week, the collaborative B/B/S/ project, which finds Baker joining up with Svarte Greiner for a gorgeous disc of Necks-like brooding jazziness, and this one, a sort of family affair, a duo of Baker and his brother Richard on drums, and in some ways it's actually a lot like the B/B/S/ record, droned out, trancey and mesmeric, a sort of sprawling hypno-rock minimalism, jazzy and skittery, looped and cyclical, but where B/B/S/ is all low end thrum and murky darkjazz swirls, Smudging is much more psychedelic, and krautrocky, Baker's bass and guitar sounds heavily processed and transformed into soft billowing synth like swells, and long shimmering drones, slipping easily from soft focus dreamdrone riffing, to something way more abstract. Brother Richard's drumming is subtly yet powerful, measured and minimal, but with plenty of expression. Check out the opening track "Sage", which is a gorgeous hazy slowburn motorik kraut-psych shoegaze epic, the sound wreathed in gauzy wisps of atmosphere, and subtly glimmering effects, the track loping and hypnotic, the drums gradually fading out, as the guitars blur and bleed into a gorgeous chordal smear, laced with cool little backward effects and lush softly shifting layers.
The rest of the record follows a similar sonic blueprint, although pushes that sound into interesting directions. "White Desert Cedar" is like the opening track, but wrapped in a crackling field of weirdly distorted FX heavy guitar, the vibe very Circle-like, but way more blissed out, dreamy and druggy, a pulsing psychedelic shoegaze trance-out, that like many of the tracks here, even though lengthy, end way too soon. Things do get even more Circular on the side 1 closer, which explodes into a blown out hypno rock blast, only to have the drums immediately splinter and and instead of a driving krautjam, the song seems to expand into some serious tripped out kosmische heaviness, the guitars swirling and super distorted, the drums wild and chaotic, but still providing a firm anchor for Aidan's soaring sheets of blurred buzz and muted howl.
The flipside slows things down, opening with a brief burst of synth like soft noise, before settling into a dreamy sprawling meander, shuffling and drowsy, all beneath a haunting choral like drone. The follow up too, unfurls gradually, super abstract spaced out drift, keening tones floating above warm bass swells, laced with looped melodies, slow shifting textures, and all manner of cosmic effects, the perfect score for a weightless drift through the abyss, before finally finishing off with another dreamy brooder, a slow jazzy creep, all barely there percussion, hushed guitar filigree, more woozy bass thrum, a dreamy nocturnal skitterscape, darkly cinematic, mysterious and lovely.
LIMITED TO 400 COPIES!!
If 79 tracks over two volumes was a little too much to digest of John Baker's strange and jazzy electronique miniatures, than this vinyl version might be just the thing for you, as it condenses the most interesting 25 tracks from both volumes.
Delia Derbyshire may embody the otherworldly beauty and mystique behind the sounds of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, but John Baker was its alchemical heart. Who else could take a simple tone from air being blown over a bottle and make it into a warm and electrifying panorama of melodious sound? In this LP, we find TV adverts, library pieces, jazzy soundtracks, radiophonic pieces and home recordings as well as an interview on how he made the sounds contained here, and his broadcast obituary. Baker had a knack for melody, and often imbued his mechanically made recordings with a warmth and playfulness that his more mathematically-inclined contemporaries lacked. The jazz and library compositions (made for the Southern and Peer International organizations) are similar in form and sound to Basil Kirchin and Michael Garrick (two other Trunk luminaries), urgently spright and pastoral, sometimes soft and spacey. Yet he could also establish veils of mystery and drawn out suspense in his carefully composed themes. Our favorite in particular is "Jazz Advert" a track we suspect Broadcast or Stereolab must have been very aware of. However, Baker's real talent is brevity. With most of the tracks contained here lasting under a minute, he evokes a complex and engaging sound world that is perfectly encapsulated within its miniscule timeframe.
Covering his entire musical career from 1954 up until his death in 1985, and exhaustively culled from boxes and boxes of often unmarked tapes, this is a great and essential purchase for anyone interested in early British electronic music.
