Multi-instrumentalist Aidan Baker has garnered esteem for his stratospheric loop technique on guitar, though to be sure his creative prowess is by no means as limited as all that. The Toronto-based musician also pens poetry and contributes articles of a critical bent to an assortment of international journals. Specifically in musical realms, in under ten years of activity, Baker has amassed from a limited palette a back catalogue which consists of some twenty odd records, a string of releases which surprise for their diversity and linear progression in the establishment of an over-arching aural narrative.
Baker provides a solo track and another as Nadja with member Leah Buckareff, who also has a solo work sandwiched in between. Baker's ten-minute composition is clearly bayed at the moon, with looped guitar lines shooting stratospherically, with collaged samples and tonal warble and flutter pirouetting around insistent subterranean electronic tone. The tracks density and horizontal sprawl is more brittle and taut with structural tension than one usually finds in his music. Devoid of drums or Baker's tendency to dabble in post-rock mechanics, the piece moves with a surprisingly flexible forward motion.
Taken on their own terms, each piece in fact displays a kinetic energy. Together, however, there is little thematic links between tracks and they ultimately fail to gel as a whole. As the parting gift it initially was after a live performance in Friese' Bremen, the document makes perfect sense, but as a full-length release it looks thin and spotty in places. One can still be thankful that the release didn't so easily slip away, for the individual works are crisp and crunchy as a unit, perfectly weighed and well crafted as compositions that leave some room for improvisation.
"Jornada del Muerto", from Buckareff, is a piece that slakes its thirst at its own well, a constant shuffling and revisiting of its mass, doggedly unsettling in its girth, physicality, and rehashed riffs, with Buckareff all the while circling above tweaking the atmospherics to create a dense heat haze. The closing track as Nadja makes for the most full-on sensory assault: whereas the previous works hierarchal differences were slight, with no one chief element dominating, and only higher waves overturning the others, it is driven by thunderous articulations on (steel?) drums, with hissy rubbings and scratching guitar operating on the front line. The piece is stretched out a bit longer, amounting to some seventeen-minutes, which results in some slight stodginess in the middle. While it finishes with a glorious racket, this mid-section certainly might have been honed in the studio. Still, all in all, this album documents some interesting solo and group playing, as they cover some bustling and edgy material that doesn't always come off.
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