Nadja to Release Luminous Rot May 21 on Southern Lord
My brain did that thing it does when news comes in about new Nadja. It went, ‘Oh hey, new Nadja, you should check that out.’ And so, I click’d on the ol’ linkeroo, and sure enough, the new Nadja‘s pretty darn good. The album and accompanying video share the title Luminous Rot, and the theme of making first contact with aliens — perhaps someone in Berlin has been watching The Next Generation? — comes with the probably-not-happenstance fact that this is apparently the first Nadja LP to have been mixed by someone other than the duo themselves. Considering the breadth of their discography, that’s significant.
Southern Lord will release Luminous Rot on May 21, and you can dive into the moody vibes of the title-track at the bottom of this post. Nadja remain as outside-genre as ever, it would seem, no matter who’s tweaking levels on the recording.
To the PR wire:
Nadja return with a new album, Luminous Rot, incoming on Southern Lord in May
Nadja return with a new album Luminous Rot, incoming on CD and DL formats via Southern Lord on 21st May, with the LP version arriving on 13th August.
Nadja is a duo of multi-instrumentalist Aidan Baker and bassist Leah Buckareff—active since 2005—and making music which can be described as ambient doom, dreamsludge, or metalgaze. Nadja’s signature sound combines the atmospheric textures of shoegaze and ambient/electronic music with the heaviness, density, and volume of metal, noise, and industrial.
For the new album, Luminous Rot, the duo retain their overblown/ambient sound, and explore shorter and more tightly structured songs reflecting their interests not only in metal, but post-punk, cold-wave, shoegaze, and industrial.
Thematically, the album explores ideas of ‘first contact’ and the difficulties of recognising alien intelligence. This was in part inspired by reading such writers as Stanislaw Lem and Cixin Lui — in particular, theories on astro-physics, multi-dimensionality, and spatial geometry in “The Three Body Problem” — as well as Margaret Wertheim’s “A Field Guide To Hyperbolic Space,” about mathematician Daina Taimina’s work with crochet to illustrate hyperbolic space and geometry.
The album was recorded between their home studio, Broken Spine Studios, or Nadja’s live rehearsal studio, both in the district of Lichtenberg, Berlin.
Luminous Rot marks the first album mixed by someone else, who in this case was David Pajo. The band comment, “as big fans of Slint, we thought he might fore-front the more angular, post-punk elements of our music – the mix is quite different from our previous albums. But, as usual, we had James Plotkin (Khanate, OLD, etc) master the album as we trust his ears and aesthetic, as he’s mastered numerous records of ours.”
TRACK LIST:
1. Intro
2. Luminous Rot
3. Cuts On Your Hands
4. Starres
5. Fruiting Bodies
6. Dark Inclusions
Nadja is Leah Buckareff & Aidan Baker.
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