Bliss Out with a New Aidan Baker Song and Read His Thoughts on Improv and Faulty Hard Drives

Photos courtesy of Aidan Baker

Aidan Baker is a man of few words, choosing instead to stay as blissfully in awe of sound as he keeps the listeners who follow what the Canadian multi-instrumentalist has created over the past nearly two decades. Of those many projects, Baker’s most well-known is Nadja, a two-piece collaboration in experimental ambience at its heaviest and most significantly improvisational. That specific characteristic of free form and the vulnerability it presents for musicians themselves was a special point of distinction in Noisey's recent conversation with Baker, whose own perspective offered an introspective honesty into what he sees as an endless desire to challenge himself.

His latest album, The Confessional Tapes, will be released on Pleasence Records on February 24th, 2015. You can listen to a new track, "I Want to See More of You," right here:

Noisey: Tell me a little about this new record. From what I understand the album was born out of something fairly unfortunate. What was the impetus for it initially?
Aidan Baker: This album came out of a hard drive crash.Tthat actually happened in 2010, so this album really started at that point. I had maybe two or three of the songs written and lost them, and the recovered files were all glitchy and weird, but I kind of liked them and used that as the rhythmic basis for most of the songs. To be honest, I’m not really sure what the impetus for the album was in the first place, but it became trying to make songs out of digital artifacts.

A lot of what you’ve done has hinged on that kind of improvisation, though I imagine not really from the standpoint of having to salvage what you’d originally sought out to do creatively. Is that sort of accidental environment where you see yourself thriving the most as a musician?
Yeah, definitely. And this is a different kind of methodology. It’s taking a hard drive crash and something you have complete loss of control over, and the outcome of that is totally unintentional of course.

Where did that come from for you, that sense of creatively capitalizing on the unexpected?
I think it was always there, or at least it was cultivated by my parents who are both musicians as well. Music was a big part of our household when I was growing up, and I did study classical music and stuff, but at the same time my dad was into experimentation and synthesizers in the 70s, so that was always around. The idea of being able to take random sounds or random generated sounds or found sounds and make them into something else was sort of an accepted idea for me at an early age at the same time as learning how to play music and read music properly. That was also there, so there was a balance of the two, I guess.

Do you see one of the benefits of what you do coming right at the point where improvisation and deliberate composition sort of meet?
Definitely. There’s the one aspect that’s very controlled, but then the other aspect that’s out of control, and the sort of juxtaposition of those two things together can be very interesting things I’ve found.

When it comes to that free-form technique, one thing I’ve always wondered is where you envision the terminus of the song, or if you even consider that endpoint when so much of the composition is you giving the music free reign.
It can be open-ended, but one of the biggest issues with improv music – and I’m not just talking about myself – I’m talking about the format in general is the inability to end properly. So many improvised musicians can be great players, but they don’t have an innate sense of an overlaying structure to what they’re doing. So that’s something that I always try to keep in the back of my mind is that, yeah, I can be making interesting sound, but I also need to do something with it, and I need to go somewhere, and I need it to have a terminus or some sort of resolution or ending.

So there’s a set framework to work within and not simply an impulsive, loosely-framed compositional narrative?
Not necessarily. Sometimes, yes, but more so I think the framework is determined by the process through the act of playing. In the act of playing the idea of a structure is created as I play, so it’s like a reciprocal feedback loop sort of thing.

What do you do to put yourself in the position where you’re constantly being challenged creatively?
A big part of it is trying to do different things, different formats, different work methods, different genres. I think that’s reflected in my listening when it comes to genre because sometimes I don’t just listen to experimental music. I appreciate lots of different kinds of music, and I wanna be able to share my interpretations of different genres with different people. Not just for the pleasure of sharing, but also from the idea that trying to do a different kind of album will be a challenge for me personally. It’s a means of growing as a musician as well, of course. I’ve heard of people being critical of this kind of thing where one should focus on a specific style and craft that particularly, which has merit of course, too, but speaking from my own experience, I like to dabble in different sounds and different styles.

'The Confessional Tapes' is out 2/24 via Pleasence Records.

Jonathan Dick is improvising on Twitter.