AIDAN BAKER - Engenderine 2CD

Aidan Baker returns to Midira Records with a new double album called Engenderine. Eight tracks, each around 10 minutes, featuring slowly moving minimal ambient drone rock. Aidan Baker recorded the album between 2020 and 2022, using guitar, bass, drums, and organ. The tracks are weighty rolling, "heavy ambient" or "slow rock" fits well to describe what is happening on the 80 minutes long double album.

From Aidan Baker

The neologism 'engenderine' comes from Lydia Yuknavitch's The Book of Joan, a futuristic/dystopian/cli-fi retelling of the Joan of Arc story, and describes beings partially composed of pure energy capable of manipulating matter who, amongst a largely devolved human population, might be considered post-gender and a new evolutionary step.

Other song titles come from phrases and images from Tricia Sullivan's duology Double Vision and Sound Mind, surrealistic fantasies about the nature of reality and perception and, like The Book of Joan, the possibilities of manipulating those.

Musically, the songs on Engenderine began as a series of slowly evolving ambient guitar loops - a bed layer of reality, so to speak - over which were layered bass, drums, and organ parts. These instrumental additions - the trappings of perception, signifiers, metaphorically speaking, our attempts to codify perception - incorporate traditional rock structures and progressions but are stripped down to a sort of somnambulant minimalism that might encourage introspection, a meditative background, uneasy listening, as much as they demand attention.