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And there was an evening when the crazed metronome of blood threw me and my adolescence onto the rectangle of a balcony disguised as a makeshift raft. A storm or a tempest or a gale was brewing, and other things where by "other"—now I know, or rather I believe I know—I mean the overwhelming storytelling of symbols in formation, the harbingers of privileged moments when it would be possible to glimpse a different reality or a different arrangement of reality. What was about to coagulate was an amulet or a talisman or a potion that would predict sentences, indeed The sentences; they would be opportunities that would redeem the fleetingness by giving it the semblance of eternity. Actually, not simply opportunities: The opportunities.
And it was precisely this fascination with The expectations and The anticipations that would lead me over the years to ponder, for example, on the warmth of the Sibyls’ lunar breath a moment before it exhales treacherous oracles, or on Perseus's pounding heart as he deals with the snake-crested hiss of Medusa rather than on her subsequent beheading.
"The Sea Swells a Bit..." or an apology for the loop in three variations on the rising wave, a sea that—as it swells—grinds its claws on the rocks, yet does not display the following destructive force, an album composed in the name of a linear complexity that develops in crescendo, in orbiting, or in coagulating, reaching the brink of a zenith that is never achieved.
The obsessive, muddy, and menacing riff of the title-track—a mantra mined from the secret chambers of the most unexplored abysses—preludes the emergence of a wreck whose precise and sharp contours will never be seen, only the opalescent encrustations of tapeloops that infest it and the jazzy percussive quirks that disfigure it.
And if in the second variation the quiet, circular tribalism, hybrid between an arts lounge music and a propitiatory ritual a-là Steve Roach halts just when the florilegium of electronic trifles announces the entry of the shaman of the moment, it is only in the third that the sound becomes more structured and dense.
When an exasperating, yearning, and compact rhythm—as if from For Carnation weighed down from the waist down—gasps in air saturated with shoegaze smearings and remains mired in heavy-grained dronic puddles. A Sisyphus who looks astounded at the boulder destined for him by Zeus and does not yet decide to begin the first of his endless climbs.
In this album, Aidan Baker abandons the heavy way of his Nadja to recalibrate himself as a meticulous 2.0 soothsayer who divines from the guts of the prologues, the ante scriptum, the not-yet-manifested. As if it were enough for him to lift the blade of the ritual dagger and observe the dilated pupils, the stiffened hands, and the fear-swollen vein on the neck of the sacrificial victim.
As for me, that evening I was disappointed. That sky heavy with omens had birthed the usual, immutable, hackneyed storm: vain more than cruel, cruel more than vain.
I returned to my room inert and petrified.
A cuttlefish bone tossed by the waves on the beach.
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