Luminous Rot—the latest full-length album from the ever-prolific drone-oriented duo Nadja—feels like a dream.
The record is a May drop from Southern Lord. Nadja, who are based in Berlin, turn here towards comparatively compact tunes, with feedback-drenched riffing that evokes shoegaze, alongside thudding percussion that suggests post-punk and industrial music. Tracks across Luminous Rot often prove captivatingly repetitious, as though Nadja are building out an uneasily shifting state of being to accompany their instrumentals.
Thanks to the resounding percussion and the harshly grooving guitars, the album consistently flows forward. Yet, rather than purely a sense of exploratory wonder, Nadja have also captured a sense of existential uncertainty, as though the fabric of reality itself has somehow begun to fray. Whether at a more industrial-inclined moment like album closer, “Dark Inclusions,” or on a more surreally shifting track like “Cuts On Your Hands,” the mixes are thick with hazily disorienting atmosphere.
Bursts of emotive passion make notable appearances on the title track, which appears second on the record, but even these especially free-flowing rhythms move within a haze of feedback. As the record progresses into its latter half, the rhythms prove especially dramatic, as though capturing some kind of monumental planetary drift on record. Even within the sometimes compact song structures, Nadja sound lushly layered, but they’re also decidedly abrasive, providing a subtly depersonalized, outward-looking feel.
Below, check out what the project’s Aidan Baker had to say about Luminous Rot. Besides Baker on guitars, vocals, and drum machine for the new record, Nadja features bassist and vocalist Leah Buckareff.
Thanks for your time! Luminous Rot is awesome. Overall, how would you characterize the album’s emotional journey, if something comes to mind?
While Luminous Rot is one of our less introspective albums—sonically and structurally speaking—we always like to think our music encourages self-reflection and looking inward, just as much as it might ‘entertain’ (assuming that’s something music should do). While there is an overlying science fiction theme to the album, this is less about aliens or space opera than it is about the ability to recognize or understand sentience and consciousness—which might apply as much to interpersonal relations between humans, as much it might between humans and extraterrestrials.
The songs definitely feel somewhat free-flowing, and drone and drone-adjacent styles often seem to spotlight the way that various pieces of inspiration were put together in addition to the actual content of the inspiration itself. From a technical standpoint, how did these tracks tend to come together?
These tracks started with recordings of live drum patterns, around which the riffs and chord progressions were built. This is slightly different than our usual methods, as we normally start with simple riffs and drum machine patterns, but we wanted to explore and expand on the more organic, looser feel that these live drum patterns had. We mostly replaced the rough drum parts with sampled beats, once the main guitar part was in place, and then proceeded with our usual methods of layering up sounds and textures to give the songs their final shape.
On a related, more specific note—what sorts of things underlie when you feel that a song is finished, if something comes to mind? Some of the tracks on Luminous Rot definitely seem more compact than others in your discography.
It can be a challenge knowing when to stop adding yet another layer of sound—I do have to fight the tendency of not allowing silence its voice and resist the urge to fill every space up with sound. So, it can be tricky recognizing that perfect moment of just the right amount of saturation.
Sometimes I find myself deliberately pushing the minimalism or repetition in a song to an extreme as something of a challenge—both for myself and the listener—and as a means of forcing some kind of catharsis, but I think the more structured nature of the songs on Luminous Rot encouraged restraint. With them, it was less about creating or forcing a cathartic moment than letting the songs exist in a more compact and less sprawling form, and if one might find catharsis in them, it might be something more fleeting and fragile …
There’s a ton of ambiance in there, of course—and also some quite compelling riffing. From the composition side, are there particular elements of the arrangements that you hoped to make most prominent?
It’s always a question of balance between the riffing and the ambiance for us—the tension, the give-and-take between the different styles and sounds, textures, whether one might win out over the other. I think that push and pull is something that is always present in our work, in some degree. With Luminous Rot, the riffing and the vocal melodies are more prominent, but we still tried to maintain that tension and contrast between the more structured elements and the more atmospheric.
The atmosphere across the record definitely sets a scene—it feels like a sort of grandiose meditation. Would you say that the mood of the tracks weighed heavily on the composition process?
Mood always weighs heavily on our compositions. The establishment of the right mood is one method of determining when a song is complete. Though, as most of the ambient and drone elements of our songs are improvised, those elements themselves can direct the shape of the songs and the resulting mood can be quite unexpected or different from what we had been trying to achieve or express. But that element of randomness—the spontaneity of improvisation—is always something we embrace in the recording process.
There are, of course, some well-known classics who’ve employed feedback-heavy guitar styles à la a bit of what you have presented on this record. Are there particular inspirations that drew you to this realm of sound for this album? For instance, were you intrigued by the emotive overtones—or have you been listening to a lot of My Bloody Valentine lately—or maybe some of both?
The interplay of harmony and dissonance, textural distortion, and frequency fluctuation is something that’s appealed to me for most of my career, and, I guess, as a listener, for most of life. Certainly, My Bloody Valentine assuaged that interest—and when Loveless came out in ’91, it was an album I listened to a lot—but I don’t really find myself listening to it so often in recent years. For me, I think it’s guitarists like Justin Broadrick of Godflesh, or Caspar Brötzmann, while equally formative as Kevin Shields, that have had a more lasting influence on my playing and relevance to my listening habits.
So, a lighter question—what sorts of music, of any sort, have you really been enjoying lately? What have you been connecting with?
Lately, I’ve been listening to these artists a lot: Ministry, Napalm Death, Carcass, Marc Ribot, Ali Farka Touré, Autechre. Some newer artists I’ve been enjoying include Wvrm, Fawn Limbs, Arca, MoE, Big Brave, Body Void.
Check out the full album below:
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Photos courtesy of Nadja and Janina Gallert.
