aidan baker makes too many records. prolific, on a scale that’s detrimental. christ, nadja alone’s had something like sixteen releases over the past year and a half. too much fella and fellete, too much… so whilst i no longer go pokemon on them i always pick up the little square foetuses of brown card wrapped and stamped joy that is southern’s latitudes series. and hot on the heels of gang gang dance’s fifteen minutes of adhd jump-cuts comes this two track forty minute lump of celestial scowl; the antithesis of ggd’s post-something channel hopping.

y’know as an introduction to nadja you could do worse than this pair of shortish and easily digestible twenty minute pieces (no random-shuffle-unfriendly hour long crackle and wheeze here). on one handy disc, polyvinyl or polycarbonate, you get the two flip sides of their work: the ambient hoom, an aurora borealis of laptop clicks n whirls jostling adjacently with blasts of fuzzy mecha-psych-fennesz doom.

if it’d been up to me i’d have swapped song-titles round. connotatively the words and aurals would more accurately match and here’s an insipidly linear explanation why:

jaguar offers something cold and pretty and unsettlingly aimless. like spock’s shroud-wrapped body falling into space at the end of khan. like the collected works of michael haneke. takes it’s bloody time building miasms of bell-tones and radio interference, bird-like squall and chatter fzzchshng in the background of some creeping drone. sounds not dissimilar to a bieberized my bloody valentine tune…

sky burial, which has been cranked out live for a while but never recorded, is a much lairier beast. and following the teetering inertia of the first track feels like an amphetamine fueled fist to the ventricles. not that the pace creeps much beyond sluggish (these buggers move in epochs rather than bpm’s) but comparatively it at least offers the illusion of speed. much as the spectre of slayer did on their cover of dead skin mask. yeah so a right old technicolour romp of industrial drum machine clank and six string squall atop a meshed dervish of electronic tinkerings.

you could easily dismiss this as yet another nadja record and it’d be easy for sky burial to drown traceless in the semimonthly spurts of baker and co. easy but unfair. go find.

now, wonder if i can copyright the bieberized verb…

nadja / southern