Aidan Baker - Lost In The Rat Maze
- Written by Andrew Schagen
Aidan Baker is a prolific man - a very prolific man. Whether churning out ambient soundscapes under his own name, laying down semi-improvised droning doom epics with his main band Nadja or releasing material in collaboration with other like-minded sound artists or other fringe projects, Aidan Baker releases more material in a year than many bands or artists release in their entire careers. Unless you are a Baker completist the question that arises with each new release is ‘is this an essential one?’
On first listen, Lost in The Rat Maze sounds rather more like ‘typical’ ambient and your initial impression might be disappointment: the bold and experimental sound of Liminoid / Lifeforms and Baker tearing up genre expectations is gone and instead you are presented with 56 minutes of, on the surface, fairly conventional drone/ambient sound. Each track blends and blurs into its neighbours, creating one coherent and unified sound world, but one that is initially quite ignorable. Many different elements are present: muffled piano chords, occasional sub bass rumbles, percussive snaps and cracks, shoegazey guitar strums, almost-not-there whispered vocals. None of these elements seems to want to stand out from the background though, to impose itself too strongly on the listener: they catch your ear only as they dissolve and melt back into the background.
And yet, somehow, by the third track ‘Fanciful Flight’, the record has gathered forward momentum and is starting to drag you along with it: almost without realising it the record that minutes before was gently humming to itself in the background has become insistent and unignorable.
One of the most remarkable things about Lost in the Rat Maze is how it manages to be simultaneously calmly meditative and also full of movement. This is not ambient as, for example, Stars of the Lid create it where each note hangs perfectly suspended in mid-air and time seems to stand still. This is the ambient of movement and change: there is always an element gently driving the music forwards, like the sound of continually rippling and splashing water.
One of the landmark achievements and most essential records in Aidan Baker’s career is his collaboration with Tim Hecker - Fantasma Parastasie. This record also recalls the movement of water, in particular the great oceanic swell of waves. Lost in the Rat Maze instead recalls a constantly babbling stream, a less ambitious sound world perhaps, but on close listening no less engaging.
Is ‘Lost in the Rat Maze’ an essential Aidan Baker record? No. It does not have the scope and ambition of some of his other landmark works. It is, however, an extremely immersive and pleasing Aidan Baker record and one that should remind us how essential Aidan Baker himself is.