Nadja / Black Boned Angel

Certain things happen which I should have seen a mile off and tried to warn people about before they actually do happen and this Nadja / Black Boned Angel collaboration is one of them. Both acts or at least some of their musicians as solo acts move in much the same alternative music circles so it was a question of when, not if, they would get together and knock off a full-length recording heavy on the layered doom-drone sludge rock that Nadja and BBA are known for. Nadja's music can be thick slabs of very distorted guitar noise lava laid over inflexible mechanical rhythms, all infused with deep and complex emotions such as anguish, sadness, resignation and longing. As for BBA, I've only heard "Supereclipse" which was years ago and at the time I wasn't mightily impressed by its monotony and reliance on various Sunn0))) cliches so until now I've been giving that act a wide berth. But I am familiar with some of BBA main man Campbell Kneale's other projects, mainly the now-defunct Birchville Cat Motel which was a drone improv act plus some others which were one-offs. One cute on-off project Kneale has is Kneale.Kneale.Kneale which involves his two young sons Caspar and Winter and tends to be active when the money for ice-cream runs out. At this point perhaps I should be warning people that the project is likely to be a lot more active once the boys reach their teenage years, discover the joys of Dad's music collection and what he does in the back garden shed, and start demanding a drum-kit and some guitars ...

The forecast now done, it's time for my usual cold-blooded dissection - nurse, the scalpel please! - and first off I'm happy to say that this self-titled collaboration doesn't sound much like Nadja or what I recall of BBA. Sure, there is a lot of repetition in the rhythms and drum-beats which can be wearying and as you'd expect there is droning. The overall sound of the music isn't what I associate with the two acts: it's sharp and cutting, like metal dentures being groomed on a whirling chainsaw (electric toothbrushes being useless as well as messy chopped up), and has a relentlessly single-minded air about it. Many Nadja trademarks are present - those noisy guitar textures, very faint flute-like fluttery tunes, and what I think could be voices in the background. (But they're just as likely to be in my head as streaming out of the speakers.) As the music progresses and turns dense, I start to think of giant storms of droning cyber-hornets. The work of American soundscape artist Maryanne Amacher comes to mind as she has done music resembling massive hordes of buzzing metal bees in flight. All very impressive at first but after a few rotations of this disc, you start to get a bit less impressed with what the musicians actually do with those massive sound textures on the first track, which is not much at all apart from letting the music float on and on.

The second track shows more activity with a strong rhythm that suggests there's more power inherent in the music than we're actually hearing. The noise guitar drone is being carved up into something resembling a vague riff. A sinister little bass melody snakes around the fuzzy sculptures that are being built up and in the background are echoes of a howling guitar banshee. The sound can be a bit tinny but the whole structure is grand and solemn, and demands your respect if not your love. Yep, very repetitive too but whether you mind the repetition or not depends on how much enjoyment you're getting out of the details of the music's texture and structure which are not quite so rich as what Nadja do by themselves. The music is also cold and remote which is something Nadja can't be accused of, no matter how generic their own music becomes: there is always some emotion in Nadja's work that listeners can connect to.

This album has a great sound, sharp and intense but not threatening to overwhelm listeners, but it is an improv work so it does come over as floaty and unstructured. My main reservation is how many times listeners can play this album before they want something more substantial and varied that engages all their senses and emotions, especially where an artist like Aidan Baker is involved, because though the bands have put a fair amount of work in creating a distinctive sound, beyond that they don't do a lot with it.

It's as if Black Boned Angel and Nadja can only go so far before hitting an invisible barrier that demands they put in something beyond their combined technical skills in order to breach it, but with what they have currently, they just can't do it.

Take note Fear Falls Burning, Atavist- this is how you do a freakin' collab with the Nadj. None of that "put some random fx, wank over Nadja's usual stuff" crap, just straight forward power drone/ambient that's like every Tim Hecker release being played at the same time. With some drums and crap. This is very near perfect and if you like big, grainy walls of sound you will likely do a sex wee the instant the first riff comes on.

Seeing as the two bands live on the exact opposite side of the world I imagine this was an email/megaupload sending collab, but you wouldn't tell from the organic, sprawling mess that's this album. If this wasn't done through some serious jamming, I don't know what would be. Structure wise this is as simple as you'll get- 50 or so minutes, one riff that goes on for a little while in the first track before pedals get kicked in, things get really sadistic and noise rains down like fire.

The one riff we get is good but it's the noise, the glorious, haunting noise, that really makes this such a stunning collab. The attention to detail is stunning; the tones on here are some of the most intricate, perfect noise sculptures I've ever heard. It sounds like a thousand distorted harps getting played at the same time, or, I dunno, lots of buzzsaws. Or (as I said earlier) every Tim Hecker song getting played at the same time. It's huge and while things of this hugeness rarely hold over such a long time (there's a good 30+ minutes of very loud noisemaking, completely non stop), this works and works perfectly.

Draining, devastating, triumphant, and completely and utterly exhausting. A triumph for everyone involved; here's hoping the next Nadja + BBA collab will be sooner rather then later. If you like distorted things you should get this album.