Nadja - Luminous Rot (Aus) [LP]

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 their 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, Luminous Rot explores ideas of 'first contact' and the difficulties of recognizing 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.