Nadja
Desire In Uneasiness
Crucial Blast
Ambient musician Aidan Baker (Die Stadt, Mystery Sea, Drone Records) brings his aesthetic sensibilities and instrumental tension to the doom genre with Nadja, his shoegaze/drone duo with fellow bassist Leah Buckareff. Utilizing a simple formula of two interlocking bass guitars, drums and a crystal-beaded curtain of electronic hum, there is an incredible physicality to the performances on this album, but it manifests itself so much more beautifully than on the majority of drone music. Nadja subtly and cloyingly invade your subconscious, like a delicate red smoke wafting in under your door. Desire In Uneasiness is their first album with a live drummer, the poor soul must have been going out of his skull from the repetition and punishing workout. It’s worth it.
Y’know all those long, deathly intros to songs, just voodun drum’n’bass tattooing over the scent of burnt flesh from the Cure’s Pornography album? And then do you know those glorious, wordless explosions of light and glacial groove from Jesu’s last EP? Add just a dash of the most beautiful moments from Godflesh’s Pure and some My Bloody Valentine aether and the master tape of New Order’s “In a Lonely Place” stretched out fifty times its length to the snapping point, and then played back. That’s what the rest of the album sounds like. Not a bad mix. Heartbeat sensitive, stutter-step hip hop beats dance around thick walls of fuzzed-out subliminal bass and electronic sine waves that stretch out endlessly over a sunset horizon. New landmasses appear where once there was only formless ocean. Your eyes flutter shut, and then open again, but you can’t stop staring at the dark red lights.
Crucial Blast: http://www.crucialblast.net
