Labels: Gizeh
Review by: Captain Fidanza
For some years now, I have been unable to listen to anything done by either Nadja or Aidan Baker without immediately thinking of this.
And here’s why.
When AM first talked to me about writing reviews for Collective, I visited the website to try to get an impression not only of the music that was being reviewed here, but also of the style of review. One of the first things I clicked on was a review from 2007 of an album called “Bodycage” by Nadja and so intriguing was it, that I immediately sought out the band elsewhere on the internet.
However, putting “Nadja” into Google returned a link to a film of that name by Michael Almereyda that I hadn’t seen but thought I recognised the star of. A number of clicks later brought me a photograph of Elina Lowensohn whom I did indeed recognise as the female actress and central dancer from that extraordinary scene from Hal Hartley’s “Simple Men.”
So there you go. Incidentally, if you’ve never heard of Hal Hartley, I can recommend everything he directed from 1989’s “The Unbelievable Truth” all the way to 1996’s “Henry Fool.” I haven’t seen anything post 1996 so you’ll have to investigate those yourself.
Anyway, to Nadja.
I’m always vaguely intrigued by any release that has a massive great long title, because it immediately makes me think the people responsible for it don’t give a blind tinker’s cuss for what anybody else thinks and those things are usually the best things because they seem to represent a purer form of artistic expression.
There are times on this release when the band seem intent on producing an even more spaced-out, blissed-out, fuzzed-out version of Loop’s Peel Session compilation “Wolf Flow” whereas at other times the music descends to little more than a vaguely audible hum. At nearly an hour and ten minutes, this is certainly not a release for when you and the lads are getting ready to go down the local Sports Bar, drink your own body weight in Fosters and watch some UFC, but oddly, I imagine it would provide a near-perfect sonic accompaniment to the moment at which you wake up in a ditch several days later with a nail through your arm and realise that every second you have lived on this earth thus far has been utterly devoid of meaning.