#aidan baker

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Aidan Baker, A Year In Minutes, (Digital album, Book), AMB012, Adventurous Music, 2025

Sounds and Art by Aidan Baker

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🎵 The Recapitulation by A-Sun Amissa featuring Colin H. van Eeckhout

🎬 Album trailer for the album The Gatherer, created by Chariot Of Black Moth

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Aidan Baker ‎– The Sea Swells A Bit... 2006 : A Silent Place.

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aidan baker -- consciousness bridge

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Aidan Baker - Dualism (Mind)

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Aidan Baker et al — Trio Not Trio series (Gizeh)

It’s not as if collaboration over distance wasn’t a thing before March 2020 (it very comfortably and significantly predates the Internet, for one thing), but it quickly became a lockdown (and post-lockdown) truism that COVID accelerated and to some degree normalized that form of collaboration. Nadja’s Aidan Baker already had a lengthy track record of teaming up with all sorts of other artists (both solo and in is his duo with Leah Buckareff), and when everything changed he’d already been contemplating doing a series of trios. A live performance? An installation? When any sort of everyone-in-one-room affair quickly became impossible for the foreseeable future, the idea got adapted into the Trio Not Trio series, which combines both in-person and remote playing with a number of different collaborators, casting a wide net and then creating a series of groups with Baker and two other musicians. For each, Baker and one partner would get together in the studio, work improvisationally, and then send the tapes to the third to add what they would; then each set of recordings were tweaked and rearranged slightly so that all five came in at around an hour apiece.

Even the number of instalments is a mark of the project’s success; Baker originally planned on three trios and got so many positive responses he had to expand. Baker plays guitar throughout and always includes a drummer, but sought to recruit differing instrumentation for the last spot. Each Trio Not Trio release has track names corresponding to the ordinal numbers matching the position of the tracks (so first, second, third, etc.) translated into a different language; the album titles also take this pattern (so first, second, third, etc. but in different languages). Befitting the wide range of playing styles, genres and backgrounds that all of the collaborators brought to the series, the results are varied enough it’s worth looking at each entry in turn.

Yn Gyntaf

Welsh for “firstly,” the initial entry in the series features Oneida drummer John Colpitts (aka Man Forever) and vocalist Stacy Taylor (aka Sarff). It’s also the only one where the drummer of the trio wasn’t the one present for the initial recording. Colpitts is a powerhouse and Taylor’s wordless singing packs its own punch, but for the first five of the seven tracks here, the trio keeps things spectral and foreboding. It’s only when Baker’s guitar splits open the beginning of “Chweched” with two tracks to go that all that potential energy is converted into roiling catharsis (admittedly those two tracks do cover a solid half hour between them). Both halves work well on their own, but the collision of the two is the strongest part of Yn Gyntaf, suggesting the series’ reluctance to settle into one predictable mode even on a trio-by-trio basis.

Siguiente

The second instalment brings in My Disco drummer Rohan Rebeiro and baritone saxophonist Sofía Salvo. All three play this hour loose, spacey and abstract, with all instruments frequently making sounds pretty far away from their standard expressions. Whether it’s the sparse, alien, clicking and droning soundscape of “Primeras (Pts I y II),” the prowling baritone sax haunting “Cuarto,” or the slowly accruing damage of the closing “Septimo,” it is immediately clear that each group is going to bring very different sensibilities and possibilities to the work.

Trzecia

Baker frequently works in various genres in and adjacent to heavy metal, and fans of that side of his work might have their ears perk up seeing that Trzecia brings in Khanate/Insect Ark drummer Tim Wyskida and Pinkish Black’s Daron Beck on keyboards. “Pierwsza” isn’t very brutal at all though, starting with Wyskida’s skittering taps, Beck adding graceful piano accents, and Baker mostly staying subliminal/droning. It’s the closest the series comes to sounding like, say, the Necks. Most of the hour stays in this kind of exploratory mood, with Wyskida frequently leading the way. Only on the closing sixteen minutes of “Szósta” does the hammer come down, Baker and Beck grinding in tandem while Wyskida propels them.

Yonbanme

The fourth entry also includes the series’ second singer in the form of Ayami Suzuki (who also provides electronics), as well as journeyman drummer Tobias Humble. Whereas on Yn Gyntaf Stacy Taylor’s voice was central, giving an element for the listener to follow through the hour, here Suzuki often hangs back, with her voice almost merging with the wash of sound on the ethereal “Nibanme” for example. But then on the more heavily layered title track she also provides the closest thing the series has to discernible lyrics (good luck transcribing them though). The instalment with the fewest tracks (five) and so the longest average track times, Yonbanme may be the only trio to (almost) replicate the instrumental setup of a previous one, but that only highlights how distinctly each collaborator adds to the proceedings.

Letzte

The title here is “last” (not “fifth”) in German, and for the closing trio Baker brings in Berlin’s Jana Sotzko (Point No Point, others) on drums and Melissa Guion (aka MJ Guider) on guitar/bass/electronics. As you might expect from the rest of the series, that setup does not mean we are about to get anything at all like a conventional power trio. Guion frequently laces Baker and Sotzko’s in-the-room interplay with drifting atmospherics, from the gradual haze of “Erste” to the cavernous echoes of “Fünfte.” The closing title track sends the whole project off with a fuzzy, surging valediction, a fittingly satisfying end for a project that demonstrated significant sonic and emotional range within the various modulations of a deliberately specific format. Maybe Trio Not Trio could have five-not-five entries someday?

Ian Mathers

[imathers]

2022: Aidan Baker Corner

I’ve mentioned this in, I think, several reviews I’ve written of records Aidan Baker plays on at this point, but dude is very prolific. Like I suspect most listeners I first encountered him in immense drone doom duo Nadja but he’s in a bunch of other groups/duos/etc as well, and puts out lots of solo material as well. At the end of the year he made an Instagram post listing all of his 2022 releases and even though I’d heard a ton, I think I was still under half?

I do like a lot of his stuff; he tends to work in genres and modes I enjoy, and he’s very good at them. But at this point putting a bunch of them on my “top 40″ feels vaguely counterproductive (only in terms of covering what I listened to this year). (This also can make it hard to review, because I’ve said a lot about his music at this point and don’t want to repeat myself.) But he also consistently makes some of my favourite records of the year. So who knows how often I’ll listen to and love enough of his work that a lil’ mini-list just for him makes sense, but I was kind of amused that it did even just for one year. After the cut, a quick roundup of what my top picks for 2022 were, with links to the Bandcamp pages.

Aidan Baker — The Evelyn Tables

Named after the earliest known “anatomical preparations” in Europe, the track titles here are things like “CNS” and “Distribution of Veins“ and the sound (based entirely I believe around guitar, both electric and acoustic) is “textural ambient drone.” Very gentle and soothing, kind of crepuscular, potentially more background-y than even his other ambient stuff but in a very successful way. Has he done soundtracks? Someone should get him to do soundtracks.

Aidan Baker — Tenebrist

A solo power trio record, instrumental again but a lot more riff-based and fuzzy. Still textural (and FWIW, still excellent working music in my opinion), but maybe textural sludge instead of ambient. Heavy in a very basic, direct way and I mean that as a compliment.

Baker Ja Lehtisalo — Crocodile Tears

This is an interesting one; Lehtisalo is the main guy from Circle, a pretty interesting Finnish metal/experimental band who’ve been around for a while an done a lot. I’m not super familiar, but if you haven’t heard the record they did a few years ago with Richard Dawson, you should. He and Baker both play a bit of everything here, with Lehtisalo’s keyboards and vocals being the most audibly distinct new bits. These are palpably songs but long, dense, repetitive ones; the 14.5 minutes of the opening “(And I Want Your Perfect) Crocodile Tears“ (longest song on the record!) should tell you whether you’re on its wavelength.

Nadja — Labyrinthine

I didn’t save the two records from arguably Baker’s “main” gig with partner Leah Buckareff for the end; we’re doing alphabetical order, as always. But I did include a video for (half of) one of the tracks from this record at the beginning of this post because it’s my favourite, and honestly one of my favourite records of the year, full stop. It’s also, along with the Hatchie, the one I’m the most sad and frustrated that I couldn’t pull together a review of. At least in this case it’s partly because I reviewed another (excellent) Nadja LP in 2022. The fact that the two “main” Nadja LPs in 2022 included distinctly novel elements for the duo (four guest vocalists here, a drummer on Nalepa) is not, I think, an indication that the core concept of the band is lagging or running out of steam. I mean, I thought Luminous Rot kicked ass too! But it’s definitely exciting to see what four very different vocalists brought to Nadja’s music here, and how the duo changed things up to match each singer. The biggest praise I can give: I would listen to full LPs by all four of these distinct “bands.”

Nadja — Nalepa

Okay, so this one I reviewed. And if I wound up slightly more excited by Labyrinthine, more bands should strive to have something this good be the second-best thing they’ve released recently. Record live in studio, Ángela Muñoz Martínez brings a lot to this record. I frequently find myself wanting to compare Baker’s work in this mode (with Nadja or elsewhere) to, like, storm systems and this one really keeps putting that in my head. I also liked his solo accompanying LP of the same name but it felt like cheating to include that here too and these mini-lists already feel enough like cheating.