Zenapolæ

• Audio CD/Slim-case (2005)
• Catalog No.: ZEN007
• Price: CD $7.50

Description

Undercurrents is collaboration between US artist Matt Borghi and Canadian artist Aidan Baker. Droning ambient guitar passages are remixed, reworked, and layered into drifting, amorphous pieces drenched in reverb and echoing with an aquatic, submarine quality.

Track Listings

Album Reviews

Funprox Webzine

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 Undercurrents. 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.

JS, Funprox Webzine, 2005

Igloo Magazine

Aidan Baker and Matt Borghi are part of the new generation of low-light ambientists, travelers on the nocturnal fringes who prospect for sounds in the hinterlands and bring them back to the realms of the light where they are stretched and skewed and bent beyond recognition. Baker and Borghi make sinister drones, soundscapes that drift and haunt. Together, they have produced Undercurrents, a collaboration for Zenapolae which finds both experimenting, trying new things in an effort to discover richer terrains than they've plumbed before.

The rich discovery is the piano. Baker and Borghi traditionally start with the guitar, finding their tones in the long sustain and the tiny reverberations of feedback from their amps. However, Undercurrents is filled with piano. Cautious, careful melodies eke out space within the drifting miasmas of stretched drones, lending grace and movement to the already fragile soundscapes. There are distant field recordings of either birds or street noises (they're buried enough it is hard to tell) in "Precipitate," a whistling wind of sound that runs beneath the glowing tones of transformed guitar notes and the dripping sound of the piano. The three parts of "Undercurrent" are all filled with the slow movement of the keys, melodies that turn and twist unhurriedly while sheets of tones are spread across a watery landscape.

There are some elements of the collaborations between Robert Fripp and Brian Eno in Undercurrents, the same cascading sense of unreality coming from the guitar and the same delicate precision rising from the piano melodies. This record works well both loud and soft as if finds spaces to fill with echoes regardless of its presence in your sonic space. I like the echoes left in my head by Undercurrents; I like the sense of movement beneath a placid surface and I like how Baker & Borghi have made a record that shows off their strengths while venturing into new territories. Aces.

Mark Teppo, Igloo Magazine, 2005

sonomu (sound noise music)

An exquisite set of ambient, interleafing the talents of Aidan Baker and Matt Borghi. Baker is rapidly becoming a familiar name to fans of the drone, with an output of CDs, MP3s and CDRs in the past few years that set him on a course to rival Merzbow and the late Muslimgauze. Matt Borghi is a younger ambient veteran who in this collaboration seems mostly to devote himself to adding dashes of colour to Baker's fascinatingly morphing drones by tinkling at the piano.

It's called Undercurrents and delivers precisely what the title promises. Borghi has previously immersed himself in the depths with the limited release Huronic Minor, so he seems right at home in Baker's oceanic soundwaves. We are pulled down under into a gentle world of rest and tranquility, of warm, pellucid embrace. Atmospherics of the highest water.

Stephen Fruitman, sonomu (sound noise music), 2005

Vital Weekly

This album is totally in the nice tradition of ambient music, totally calm and peaceful. Nothing harsh happens and the intensity is kept on the lowest level. The main sounds are the atmospheric ones and also the classic piano tones which drop in occasionally. Something that sounds like field recordings also appears, but quite blurry and only with an aim of creating an atmosphere, not to surprise or shock, but just gently surrounding you with sound. It's in the best traditions of some of the greatest space ambient composers, as Steve Roach, Vidna Obmana and Robert Rich. Nice and calm, surrounding you with an atmosphere of peace.

Vital Weekly, 2005

Credits and Licenses

All parts performed, recorded, and manipulated by Aidan Baker and Matt Borghi.
Copyright © 2005 by Baker/Borghi.
Cover art by Mando Gomez.
All rights reserved.