Nadja

Nadja is a duo of Aidan Baker (guitars, vocals, strings, woodwinds, drum machines) and Leah Buckareff (bass, vocals) currently based in Toronto, Canada. Nadja came to life in 2003 as a solo project of experimental/ambient musician & writer Aidan Baker (Die Stadt, Mystery Sea, Drone Records) as something of a flipside to his solo material; a means of exploring the darker, noisier, and heavier side of atmospheric and experimental music. Nadja became a duo in late 2004.

Combining dirge-like metal riffs and heavy, minimal percussion with ethereal melodicism and something of a shoegazer asthetic, Nadja attempts to create a swirling, amorphous wall of sound that is both obliterating and uplifting. Nadja’s sound has been compared to such groups as Godflesh/Jesu, Halo, Khanate/Sunn ((0))), Boris, Esoteric, and Earth, among others.

Following a string of cdr releases, Nadja’s CD debut, Truth Becomes Death, was released in October 2005 on Montreal’s Alien8 Recordings and deals with themes of artificial life and intelligence, conflating the 15th Century legend of the Golem of Prague with contemporary ideas of computer-based artificial intelligences.

Nadja is essentially drone-god Aidan Baker’s contribution to doom. The result is something akin to Godflesh covering Troum, all trance beats at the speed of crawl as a universe of dark ambient sound and melancholy riffs revolves around those narcoleptic beats. Elements of psychedelia, free jazz, drone, and experimental music all come into play with the ambient and melodic elements, but it’s the subterranean riffs of despair that make it so doomlike. The future of doom? The world should be so lucky…

Bio courtesy of Dead Angel.