Nadja / Netherworld :: Magma to Ice (Fario)

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(02.16.09) French label Fario is an off-shoot of Feardrop magazine specifically setup to showcase collaborations between artists. Releasing just one album a year almost every year for 10 years, the staff at Fario are very selective about what they release in their name. For this edition, Italian musician and owner of the Glacial Movements label Alessandro Tedeschi in the guise of Netherworld is paired with the prolific and respected Canadian duo of Aidan Baker and Leah Buckareff, otherwise known as Nadja. Both are proponents of dark ambience, Tedeschi on the icy, windswept, atmospheric side and Baker/Buckareff on the more experimental side of the genre. Both however share a love of dark intense atmospheres, drones, tones and the intricate subtleties of dark ambient music.

Magma to Ice, packaged in an oversized folder bearing icy blue and deep orange art, features three of Tedeschi’s tracks and one long Nadja track punctuated by a joint piece. Tedeschi’s music as Netherworld closely resembles the ethics of his label; minimal, glacial, windswept and spacious. His tracks are often left to slowly find their way, unravel and paint their own picture. Tiny sounds flow in and out, deep bass tones thud and echo in the spaciousness and haunting, ethereal voices sometimes beckon from the distance. “Closing to a Glacial Dawn” could quite easily depict the beauty of a sunset over an untouched polar landscape, the sun glistening against the snow and ice as the light fades, the ice groaning as it very slowly moves and shifts. Translating the natural beauty of these icy, uninhabited regions into music appears to be a fascination for Tedeschi and his music allows him to share that intensity with the world.

Linking Tedeschi’s tracks with the Nadja’s 19 minute contribution is the collaborative title track. Having already experienced the Ice element of the title, this track is where the Magma component starts to become evident. The gentle emotive beauty of Tedeschi’s glacial ambience is slowly transformed into the blistering hot intensity of Baker and Buckareff’s dark, droning, tortured industrial grind. It is this track that builds the bridge between the two styles and leads into the interestingly titled “Kriplyana (melted & refrozen snow that looks blue in early morning).” Focused around coursing flows of molten sound augmented by low oscillating waves and soaring tones interacting in the deep hazy mass of droning texture, Baker and Buckareff take the darker, louder and noisier route of intense dark ambient electronics. As it progresses further into its 19 minute duration the track starts to take on a different tone, the droning layers slowly start to recede and pitched tones and grinding industrial elements come to the forefront, the effect being to increase the level of tension and anxiety in anticipation. As it starts to wind down however the deep drones and constant tones dissipate and all that is left is a low fuzzy drone with various forms of subtle interference that undulate and disappear completely with the merest hint of acoustic guitar.

Combining the talents of Tedeschi, Baker and Buckareff in one place was always going to be a fascinating prospect. The combination poses an interesting contrast of styles between gentle emotive ambience and experimental noise ambience. Both are dark ambient but in different ways; Tedeschi’s work is windswept and glacial whereas Baker and Buckareff’s contribution is dense, multi-layered and oppressive. Where the two styles collide, the latter was always going to be dominant but the former adds some very discrete but nevertheless effective darkness to the collaborative track. Two quite different approaches to the same genre of music, both with their respective merits and both accomplished in their own right.

Magma to Ice is out now on Fario.

Fario

Nadja / Netherworld