Nadja fans could be forgiven for thinking they know where Sonnborner is going after the first five minutes or so. That opening movement of “Sonnborner/Aten” (the track that takes up a full 30 minutes of the album’s 42), with Leah Buckareff’s bass prowling the perimeter with the placid menace of a guard dog and Aidan Baker’s soft, faded vocals and slowly unfurling guitar curling in midair, could easily be leading to one of the Berlin-based duo’s more ambient efforts, like 2013’s superlative Flipper. It’s not that every Nadja record always remains locked in the same mode, or even that there aren’t so many Nadja records that pretty much every generalization short of “has some guitars in it” has some exceptions, there’s just no particular indications that “Sonnborner/Aten” is going anywhere else. After, say, ten minutes, our imagined fan might think they’ve finally got a bead on things, after a few strings (Simon Goff and Agathe Max on violin, Julia Kent on cello) wafted in before, at about the eight minute mark, one of the band’s customary walls of sound slammed down. The build was gradual but inevitable, and now it would be easy for them to just lock in and bear down (certainly a method that’s paid dividends before). But one of the things that makes Sonnborner such a vital release for Nadja is that there’s still some new(ish) things they want to try.
Truthfully, if “Sonnborner/Aten” did just want to recapitulate Nadja’s masterful “drone gaze” sound for the rest of its length it would still be satisfying, but it would be worth wondering why bring that string trio along for the ride. They do surface throughout, but it turns out that it’s not until the song’s 18th minute, possibly when it’s moving into the “Aten” part of the composition, that their presence really becomes central. As the duo sharply recedes, the trio takes center stage, first with a series of overlapping string drones but gradually shifting into a gracefully foreboding, drawn-out series of encounters that sounds more like Rachel’s, or even someone like Ingram Marshall, than what the listener is used to hearing from Nadja. The band’s consistent forays into minimalism and drone, and the way the trio’s contributions kept showing up during the track’s first two phases, prevent this lovely and possibly unprecedented (Nadja and especially Baker are prolific enough it’s hard to keep up and keep track) arrangement from feeling like it was shoehorned in. On future listens the three movements in “Sonnborner/Aten” mesh well, the pleasantly mild shock of where the song goes made up for by the way the whole thing hangs together when you know what’s coming.
Of course, there’s still another 12 minutes to Sonnborner, and those four briefer songs prove to be no less subtly exploratory in the context of the duo’s work, nor any less interested in the fun of sudden right turns. “Sonnborner/Aten” comes to a halt and immediately the listener is shoved into the frantically pummelling drum machine and rapid grind of the guitars on the wonderfully named “In the Shadow of the Wing of the Thing Too Big to Be Seen” (a title as evocatively suited to Nadja’s music as a whole as any they’ve come up with). Here Baker’s vocals are fleshed out into a harsh growl, tempos (relatively) skyrocket, and parts are as close as Nadja is likely to come to death metal. The closing, slightly more fleshed out “Sunborn (Coda)” returns to a beautifully balanced doom metal palette, this time with the string trio adding color to the statelier riffs found here, but compared to “Sonnborner/Aten”’s beautifully arranged sprawl it still feels brisk and spontaneous.
Over the years Nadja have tried out and even returned to one approach after another, but they have tended to separate out approaches from one approach to the next. Sonnborner not only tries out a couple, but they never feel like they’re being assembled in a haphazard manner; for Nadja, expansion and refinement seem to be (or to be becoming) simultaneous processes. That dynamic and conceptual variation makes this record not only one of their most approachable, but also ample proof that Nadja still have plenty of tricks up their sleeves.
Interconnection is a common theme to Italian artist Le Nevralgie Constanti (Miko Rossi, translated as “The Constant Neuralgia”), whose work is featured in Nadja’s Sonnborner. It is not the simple interconnectedness of which so many a New Age perspective dwells upon, but one in which a transmutation of suffering and happiness occurs, the beauty of life not a singular experience but a multiple one…
