Aidan Baker – Aneira

Glacial Movements

Aneira appears as one long track, and this time round it’s simply Aidan Baker on his own with a twelve-string acoustic guitar. This is a piece which is far more isolationist than that simple statement might at first appear, as Baker uses the instrument as a sonic generator to produce a whole host of glacial textures and tones. While the sound of steel strings is still evident in the rustling, shimmering noises, their twanging rustle sometimes brings to mind the wind rattling the ice-clad rigging of a wooden sailing ship stuck fast in ice, as do the ominous groans and drones which shudder and heave at the low end.

As listens go, this one is often quite oppressive, and there’s no denying that Baker has captured an impressionistic portrait of forces of nature in slow, glacial motion. There is an all-encompassing feeling of constriction, as if lungs and ribcage are being gradually compressed, like the hull of the notional ship or the great (Ant)Arctic floes themselves as they push against each other while the ocean freezes tighter and tighter. The seemingly endless grind captures the lonely, eternal night of the polar extremes, and there is definitely little feeling that little natural light ever falls during the first forty minutes spent in the virtual frozen wastes – but then comes relief in fragmentary glimpses of Fahey-esque melodic flickers shining over the horizon like the long-awaited dawn.

Melancholic and attenuated they might be, and all the while the harsh environment they enter continues to rage its uncaring storm, but tentatively, as the brightness strengthens, so the darkness inevitably fades and warmer colours start to spread. Waiting out the storm brings its own reward, and the relief that the uncoiling, thawing sound that these strings bent and thrumming provides is almost physical.

-Linus Tossio-