header_image
BAKER, AIDAN  I Fall Into You  CD   (Basses Frequences)   14.98


One of the first releases to come out on the Basses Frequences label was this reissue of Aidan Baker's 2002 CD-R I Fall Into You. Originally released on Public Eyesore, the album has been remixed and re-mastered, and it's another essential album for the rest of you folks who, like myself, can't get enough of Baker's dreamy abstract guitar-drone. As with many of the other releases from this period in time, Baker's music on I Fall Into You is pretty dark, the five tracks often developing an ominous pall over their billowy drones, and there's but the songs also present a propulsive energy as well, due to the use of a drum machine. If it weren't for the programmed drum machine beats, Fall would be easily comparable to the other albums that came out around this period (Concretion, Eye Of Day, etc.), lengthy expanses of dark and dreamy feedback melted into warm waves of sound, washing across endless plains of subtle amp rumble and keening high end skree, looped melodies spinning out into the ether, deep bass pulses and eerie fragmented melodies plucked out on an acoustic guitar and left to float through shadows.

But that drum machine surfaces on almost every track, and it sometimes takes this close to Nadja territory; the opener "Lapse" begins in a slow flood of lush Tangerine Dream-esque guitar bliss, and then the drum machine materializes, way off in the distance, thumping out a skittering quasi-breakbeat, the dubby mechanical snare hits echoing through a pink haze of soft, shimmering drone, like a Nadja jam stripped down to its skeletal frame, with just a delicate layer of dreamy drift and almost sax-like strains of distorted guitar drifting like a sort of jazzy minimalist dreamdirge. On the following track "Lysis", Baker is joined by vocalist Naomi Okabe, who recites poetry over a glitchy abstract dronescape as weird backwards feedback and streaks of squelchy electronic noise blend together with thick smears of warm warbly guitar, later joined by a shuffling, jazz-style drum machine loop. "Symbiosis" is almost purely made up of swirling guitar ambience, and if the drum machine is present here, it's buried so deep it's barely perceptible; the brief (at just over a minute) interlude "Phage" is a spoken word piece from Okabe, who recites a passage from Milton's "Paradise Lost" while surrounded by whispered vocal noises from Baker. The final track "Lethe" returns to the shuffling, woozy dreaminess of the first track, the drums flattened into a delicate distant trip-hop like groove beneath clouds of crackling electronics, wordless male and female voices whispering, a gorgeous looped melody cycling over and over, everything glazed with a dreamy, dubby haze, a thick heavenly fog of drone and hum that seems to stretch out forever. This is another stunning collection from Baker, and is highly recommended to both longtime fans and newbies to his solo work. Limited to five hundred copies.


Track Samples:
Sample :
Sample :