Aidan Baker & Matt Borghi – Undercurrents

In the liner notes of Brian Eno’s ‘Music for airports’, Eno comes to a description of ambient music. He states: ‘Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular. (…) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.’ This was in 1978, but still, a lot of composers of ambience hold up to this advice. Eno is regarded as one of the godfathers of the genre.

Undoubtedly his advices have inspired Baker and Borghi as well. ‘Undercurrents’ is an ambient work, very deep and dense, reminding me of Vidna Obmana’s ‘Shadowing in sorrow’ and especially Robert Rich’s ‘Trances/ drones’. Classic ambient so to speak.
‘Undercurrents’ is especially good in my opinion since both artists really have attention for melody, besides an artistic eye for the creation of deep, multifaceted drones. Track six ‘Precipitate’ for instance, is an astoundingly sorrowful, deep-layered sound construction.

The great thing about artists with expensive equipment is that you can hear it in their music. So it is on ‘uUndercurrents’. This is not just a collection of fragments, of piled up noises… it is a harmonic blend of utterly fine-tuned sounds, a lot of them coming from ordinary instruments. The record sounds as a whole of intertwined tracks, undercurrents strong enough to pull you down to sunken cathedrals.

artist: Aidan Baker & Matt Borghi
label: Zenapolae
details: 8 tracks, 50 min, 2004