At the risk of being hyperbolic, it seems as though we are living in the twilight of decay. As we humans march forward into time, relentlessly bearing down upon other creatures and their habitats, while envisioning our own post-ecological futures, we’ve come to create artifacts that will not decompose. The future of decay does not look good.
It it refreshing, then, to come across the holes in the system. Aidan Baker’s The Confession Tapes is an album that almost wasn’t. The files, lost initially in a hard drive crash, were recovered and reconstructed. The reconstructed files, with their fizzes and glitches and scars, form the foundation upon which Baker’s songs fuck up and play out.
The songs, as you can hear below, are gorgeous things (unapologetically among my favorite from this year, so far). Deep, resonant echoes are carried forward in jazzy quietude. Moodiness abounds. Confessions, always already full of reconstructions and glitches, are, at once, the concrete and nebulous material through which these songs have their being. It is, as with so much of Baker’s work, worth your decaying time.
Listen to The Confessional Tapes streaming below and pre-order it here.
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• Aidan Baker: http://aidanbaker.org
• Pleasence Records: https://soundcloud.com/pleasence-records