Aidan Baker’s clearly been keeping busy – just for a change. His already enormously extensive discography sees two further additions in as many months with a brace of collaborative works that stand as distinctly separate pieces of work.
‘Glass Crocodile Medicine’ (Latitudes, out 26th May 2013), recorded in collaboration with Plurals, features just two tracks, but their epic nature more than compensates. The 20-minute ‘Dead Foxes in the Street’ is a long, gently undulating drone in surround sound, expansive and textured, slowly building. Distant piano and chimes gradually enter the mix, swelling and weaving a multifaceted sonic tapestry as it evolves toward a sustained crescendo. ‘Turning Children Into Mice’ – which burns slowly for another massive 18 minutes – is a very different piece. Built around a deliberate, repeating bassline over which haunting echoes of guitar and extraneous sounds ripple and warp. The sound thickens and bass notes resonate against one another as the individually picked notes become a strum and dense rumbles of roaring noise surge with increasing intensity. Sonorous, moody and bleak, it leads the listener across expansive and challenging terrain.
‘Already Drowning’ (Gizeh, out 15th April 2013) is a very different album and features a different vocalist on each song. The title track, featuring Clara Engel on vocals, has a sultry, ethereal jazz feel to it at the start, before it breaks to a searing and majestic post-rock crescendo. Jessica Bailiff brings a serenely detached vocal to the string-soaked ’30 Days / 30 Nights’, which stretches out across nine minutes of heavy atmosphere to spectacular effect. In contrast, the gentle acoustic guitar sound of ‘Mein Zwilling’ is almost conventional in nature. Across the seven tracks, Baker explores a range of styles, and without exception, the vocals are perfectly matched: the avant-orchestral ‘Tout Juste Sous La Surface, Je Guette’ with vocals by Geneviève Castrée (aka Ô Paon) is spine-tingling, and the 11-minute opus that is ‘Ice’, featuring Liz Hysen of Picastro progresses upwards from a smoky flutter to a swell of brass and positively heady atmosphere.
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It would be hard to know on sound alone that these two albums were recorded by the same artist. On the one hand, they demonstrate just how profoundly the act of collaboration can affect the creative process, and how it can be deeply enriching. On the other, they demonstrate Baker’s versatility, and remarkable capacity to create music heavy with dramatic tension that evokes different moods. And both are equally stunning.
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