Album Review: Nadja - The Stone Is Not Hit By The Sun, Nor Carved With A Knife

Coming just 5 months after their last album release, Sv, one does wonder quite how Nadja achieve such a level of productivity. I mean, what the hell? Do they live in a recording studio? Do they just live jam this stuff? Yes, it’s basically a 3-track drone-cum-noise album, but it still needs to show ingenuity and progression. Well, with this particular pair of inquiring minds and their safe hands, I’m confident they can still steer it to a satisfying conclusion. Can they?

Well, there’s definitely some progression here. More melody than before, some interesting warm tones and FX tweaks. But I’m getting ahead of myself. That mysterious album title – what gives? Well, it comes from a runic inscription on a Norwegian gravestone – the Eggja Stone – which actually provides some of the lyrical content on the record. And the tracks?

“The Stone” is loaded with elephantine potency. It twinkles like splintering glass falling upon its top layer, and sinks down to the alien, sub-aqueous thunder of metal under extreme pressure. After ten minutes, spasms of electric guitar kick in to set up the whirring, bass-heavy clank of some vast industrial machine. Blasts of steaming hiss squirt as if from pin-holes as ethereal voices whisper non-sequiturs and pistons drive the beast towards a semi-melodic, melancholic middle-section before returning to the melee.

“The Sun” is the lightest, most appealing prospect I’ve heard from Nadja for a good few years. With rich, ambient tones and emotive, spiralling stringwork, this plays like an ambient, post-rock track not too dissimilar to something from the back catalogues of Palms or OSI. There are vocals that whisper around the edge of your lobes, without ever taking root inside your ear canals. They are sung as if from behind some parallel dimension. There are waves, there is a beach and a sun and someone is talking close to your ear. It’s unsettling, and even more so when the whole image begins to dissolve into a dark malevolence of phantom-like white noise and subterranean crush. A wall of sound, sprawling, crawling and devouring all.

“A Knife” is far less ambitious than its compatriots. It’s a mixture of atmospheric, ambient drift, vibrant distortion and bristling fuzz and forms a 22-minute amorphous journey through a skyscape of sound.

Ultimately, each movement owns the space in which it exists, each differing in character, each stamping its authority upon the listener. Fans of drone and ambience will find these new worlds excitingly moreish. Is there enough to warrant repeat journeys? Considering its mammoth 79-minute runtime, maybe not for a while but, hell, we’re glad we visited.

Also online @ Ave Noctum = http://www.avenoctum.com/2016/10/nadja-the-stone-is-not-hit-by-the-sun-gizeh-records/

Album Review: Nadja – Sv

Drone, at its most monotone, can drive some wild. It is a beast that dwells beyond the reach of most, existing in a parallel universe to the dark fury of the majority of heavy metal acts; light years from the sugary sweet licks of rock n’ roll. Dip a toe in and you’ll fail to judge the temperature or miss the drag from the tugging swell of what lies beneath. It is music for the slow-movers, the thinkers, the heavy-lidded.

Nadja are masters of this particular genre and this 41-minute single-track album is a true work of art. Aidan Baker & Leah Buckareff have combined the elemental with the industrial and set it to the bruising grind of dark electronica.

An eerie opening constructs itself a sub-aquatic world with an electrical buzz and an mechanical hum that builds to a visceral crescendo. By five minutes the bass rumble and harmonic nuts and bolts have begun to lock into place. At seven and a half minutes the percussive elements have steadily begun to fizz and click into life. At nine minutes the steady morphosis is ebbing and flowing. The whole has become an unstoppable locomotive riding the rails, chuntering and chittering with gritty signs of life. Deeper in the sounds have begun to fully combine – here, the electronic beat drives ever onwards and the sub-level bottom-end rattles the ribs. As the mind empties and the focus becomes absolute, “Sievert” lords it as dance music for the undead.

Thirty-three minutes down and the switch-up occurs, changing its angle of impact to open up the rhythm and create space. Here, it is like riding the back of a vast, lumbering beast. The drums come into focus and the music’s black grip tightens. Dread takes over and the slow degradation of the world Nadja have created shows its first cracks. The crust snaps, time patterns and effects warp and reality begins to leak back in. That space you’ve been staring at on the wall for the last half-hour is no longer your focal point as Baker strikes the single piano key that breaks the spell.

Summing up, Sv is experimental drone that slowly warms to its task before worming its way inside and reconfiguring your heartbeat, your pulse, your brainwaves. Helpless, you’ll dance to its multi-layered echoing vibe over and over.

Also online @ Ave Noctum = http://www.avenoctum.com/2016/05/nadja-sv-essence-music/