AIDAN BAKER
Aidan Baker returns to Midira Records with a new double album called “Engenderine”. Eight tracks, each around 10 minutes long, featuring slowly moving minimal ambient drone rock. Aidan Baker recorded the album between 2020 and 2022, using guitar, bass, drums and organ. The tracks are weighty rolling, “heavy ambient” or “slow rock” fits well to describe it. Once you started listening the attraction of the tracks is charmingly embracing you. Nearly 80 minutes of massive sounds.
“Engenderine” comes as a double CD, housed in a massive 8 panel digisleeve, featuring collages by Aidan Baker.
Aidan Baker about the album:
The neologism “engenderine” comes from Lydia Yuknavitch’s “The Book of Joan” a futuristic/dystopian/cli-fi retelling of the Joan of Arc story, and describes beings partially composed of pure energy capable of manipulating matter who, amongst a largely devolved human population, might be considered post-gender and a new evolutionary step.
Other song titles come from phrases and images from Tricia Sullivan’s duology “Double Vision” and “Sound Mind,” surrealistic fantasies about the nature of reality and perception and, like “The Book of Joan,” the possibilities of manipulating those.
Musically, the songs on “Engenderine” began as a series of slowly evolving ambient guitar loops – a bed layer of reality, so to speak – over which were layered bass, drums, and organ parts. These instrumental additions – the trappings of perception, signifiers, metaphorically speaking, our attempts to codify perception – incorporate traditional rock structures and progressions but are stripped down to a sort of somnambulant minimalism that might encourage introspection, a meditative background, uneasy listening, as much as they demand attention.
CD 1
01. Baby Dragon Slaughter
02. Calabi Yau Manifestions
03. Dorvay
04. Six Finger
CD 2
01. Resurrection of the Child Army
02. Fear Sculptures
03. Plastic As An Emotion
04. Blood Like A Chorus of Insects
