Aidan Baker
Pithovirii
ITALY GLACIAL MOVEMENTS GM053 CD (2024)
Canadian Baker here with what is apparently his third release under the imprint of this Italian label that specialises in icy sounds. Matter of fact it’s the first one we’ve seen from Glacial Movements that doesn’t have a snowy Arctic cover.
Baker dug out a small piece of our listening heart as Nadja when he released Truth Becomes Death for the Alien8 label, but that was 20 years ago now. It was a time when all the world wanted heavy endless doom-rock drones, and Nadja came close to toppling Sunn O))) from that particular pinnacle. I always thought of him as a bass guitarist for some reason, but now I learn he’s classically trained and very adept at working his electric guitars and effects, the former hopefully comprising a collection of at least 800 “axes”, all of them with blue solid bodies, and the latter a digital virtual board the size of Washington Square that can reprocess loops into all infinity.
Pithovirii is, of all things, a concept album – something you may have thought belonged to 1973 and prog rock, but is now evidently being reclaimed by the hip cognoscenti – themed on gigantic viruses from 30 thousand years ago. They were only discovered in recent years when scientists dug their way into a sample of permafrost in the Siberian wastes, and this find has triggered grave concerns that one day we’ll unleash further pathogens and fatal microbes into the world, if our current rate of strip-mining and intensive drilling for fossil fuels continues unabated. As it happens, those Russian viruses turned out to be harmless to mankind, but we got lucky this time. Baker both celebrates and mourns all of the above as he muses and ruminates on his layered guitars, with his questing mind also considering chapters from a not-unrelated novel Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin. There’s also a subtext concerning the Tunguska meteor event, a time when the earth was struck in 1908 to devastating effect. Forlorn trees, stricken by the mighty blast, inhabit photographs sure to lend extra poignancy to the already wistful mood on this release.
In short – freezing cold, deadly viruses, environmental ruin and gigantic explosions are all referenced in this slow, droney, ambient guitar haze; what’s not to love? Artworks by Lia Bosch may attempt to visualise these two amoeba-infecting virus nasties living in the ice, one of them named Sibericum and the other Massileinsis, which Baker uses as track titles for his atmospheric haunts; and if Bosch doesn’t directly depict them thriving in the midst of the permafrost, it’s a very good imaginative realisation of same. Just listen and you can already feel your nervous system collapsing as these insatiable Russian bugs invade your natural defences. From 8th March 2024.