Baja

MAPS/SYSTEMALHEUR CD REVIEWS:
AUDIVERSITY.COM: After spending the majority of the week reviewing records from pretty substantial names, probably the most obscure band of the bunch easily takes my vote for "Best Album I’ve Heard in a While" (a coveted prize). German composer, musician and sound artist, Daniel Vujanic, and his loose collective known as Baja conjure an amazing array of subtly moving music with their two-part debut on Stilll Records. The first 40 minutes of the record consists of the cut-and-paste experimental prog-folk of Maps, a striking combination of minimalist pioneer Terry Riley, the style-bending finger-picking of John Fahey and the genre-mashing collages of Four Tet stripped away of the electronic beats. The music moves smoothly but it’s clearly the product of a sound artist, a musician that pieces varying samples in an unconventional manner. Through one song you’ll hear quiet piano melodies, fusion-leaning electronics, flourishes of clarinet, outbursts of free-jazz saxophone, sprays of white noise and jazzy, Szabo-like guitar riffs. And just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, ‘Droma Waves’ kicks off the second half of the album, Systemalheur. It begins in the same manner as Maps, but before long your ears are being captivated by lush Tortoise-like compositions of jazzy post-rock (brought up in a world of European electroacoustica rather than Chicago house) that get increasingly catchier as the disc continues on. The latter theme-based 30 minutes even drift toward inventive indie acts like The Books and Psapp on frequent occasions. This genius piece of music is hard to describe with words and impossible to categorize, so if you are a big fan of any of the aforementioned artists, blended genres that especially included folktronica, electroacoustica or jazz-anything, and/or challenging yet laid-back music please, please, please do yourself a favor and pick up this disc; because you know as well as I do, you deserve it. ____________________________________________________________ ____ COKEMACHINEGLOW.COM: German composer and found-sound artist Daniel Vujanic, toting a vague collective of one-time contributors/bandmates, has garnered numerous comparisons to the Books. That’s apt -- and, where style is concerned, reasonable enough given Maps/Systemalheur’s gentle acoustic and vocal snippets -- though the deconstruction at work here on Baja’s debut is taken (or perhaps regressed) exponentially further. Instead of the Books’ subtle and playful (and, I should add, fast growing old) subversions of language that contrast words’ referents with the context in which language appears, Baja captures what sounds like thought on the edge of speech intentionally precluded and restricted to its infant stages. This leaves us with emotion unimpeded by the tyranny of language’s imposition of strict meaning. Depeche Mode said on their “Enjoy the Silence” (from 1990’s Violator) that “words” were “like violence” that “break the silence.” Baja assumes as much without the hypocrisy of stating that that’s the case: “Words are very unnecessary / They can only do harm.”The album is divided into the two sides suggested by the title: though the latter tends to more cohesive -- or at least mellifluous and pleasant -- arrangements, both subscribe to the same overarching anti-linear deviations despite how rarely there is even a core to deviate from. For example, “Droma Waves (For History’s Aroma)” (and what a thing to write a song for) officially kicks off the second half; while its last three minutes come closest to proving stylistic comparisons with the Books carry water the song is as cut-and-paste as anything from the album’s first half. It’s all a part of the album’s tendency to make of its unnecessary separations and borders a defining aesthetic. Throughout, one track can run in excess of twelve minutes while the next can be only fifteen or thirty seconds, arbitrary brackets given how each song can then be further and further subdivided almost at random without a consistency of mood or tempo or a reoccurrence of sounds.Vujanic also, cheekily, plays on expectations with regards to the album’s outermost borders, a move probably obvious given that he takes any and every opportunity to subvert traditional song structure everywhere else. Opening track “Maps (Fake Starts and Fake Alarms)” is eleven and-a-half minutes of maddening silences, clicking, buzzes and then sporadic outbursts of musicality. The album ends with “A-one, two, a-one-two-three-four” count-in to nothing, one of its few (and thankfully fleeting) instances where it resorts to pure novelty and doesn’t focus instead on locating intrinsic musicality in the spaces between dominant songwriting forms.Which isn’t to say that belligerence is the album’s principal feature; Vujanic is no dickish Criss Angel tricking his mother into thinking the bloody deconstruction taking place before her is actually his body in a wood chipper only to smugly appear at the end, messiah-like, to revel in a superiority which only exists on his own terms. The deconstruction taking place meets us in the middle: “Anatomy and Variation” is gorgeous, guitar-based chill-out, and the stunning “Realphabetizations” and “Nona’s Theme” are more traditional (read: easier) rewards, hidden in the album’s last third for those with the attention span to treat the album like the complex and wordless discussion it evokes. Still, Maps/Systemalheur doesn’t rely on groove-based electronic production; it resembles free-jazz interspersed in minimalist pastiche and insistent polyphony. Even its track titles, many of which stubbornly refuse to remain static, append bracketed subtexts or are strangely absent of content where one might expect the solidity of statement to qualify Baja’s nebulous experiments. The album itself is dichotomized and split, its title (the first “statement” anyone will read after the band’s name) announcing the multidirectional music therein; this is unlike, say, Matmos, who subscribe to the same methodological bricolage as their underlying songwriting tool but also attached a thesis to The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast (2006), which limited the album to a predetermined political direction while simultaneously transforming music that was otherwise located in the gut and the hips into a semi-exclusive intellectual exercise.It’s not that Maps/Systemalheur resists being brainy. It’s just that the intellectualism at work in Baja’s music is located in the listening, detected in the way it emotes intelligently rather than intelligently references emotion. By making process and reward one in the same, mirroring the obstinacy and arbitrary nature of human emotions, Vujanic is using electronic music in a way that makes it less a statement about media or a contemporary discussion about subverting conventional songwriting than a tool of matter-of-factness; Vujanic is a Apollonian fully aware of the necessity of his Dionesian counterpart, returning us to a more fundamental discussion about how words may never encapsulate what it is we want to say, or how music makes us feel.Conrad Amenta April 10, 2007 ____________________________________________________________ ____ DROWNEDINSOUND.COM: Late last year I discovered the Stilll label via its co-founder Jérôme Deuson (also of aMute), and in almost no time it superseded Transgressive as my favourite label of the year . Maps / Systemalheur is the seventh release from the Belgian label, and the first from Baja – the creative outlet for electronic/free-jazz composer Daniel Vujanic.Maps / Systemalheur is a double album comprising 14 compositions. In parts you could cite Tortoise as a major influence; others, the experimental electronics of The Books. Within the first minute of ‘Fake Starts And False Alarms’ Baja encompasses both of the genres in a kind of free-form, stop-start style which permeates a large proportion of the record. Vujanic himself plays the biggest part in the proceedings, though a set of outside musicians loosely base their guitars, marimbas, vibes aside his haunting electronics. Many of the tracks on Maps build themselves around quiet cut-up samples of acoustic guitars and laid-back grooves, rarely deviating from their path. At times it could be compared to Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid’s Exchange Sessions' quieter moments, but the rhythms are far less focused and the electronics are much more advertent to the songs in hand.A major problem with free-jazz records is that an over-saturation of ideas can render an album almost impenetrable to the listener. Vujanic is constantly opening doors to new scenarios within the record, but because of its relaxed, amiable mood, it never really becomes obtrusive and uncomfortable. One thing which will polarize opinion is the fact that you never know what’s around the corner – some will deign its incoherency as a nullification of the album’s brilliant musicianship, while others will see it as a strength.With the second half of the record (Systemalheur) , Baja ups the tempo, which serves as an arresting wake-up call to those caught within Maps' relaxed mood. Vujanic begins to bring in a new collection of sounds with his diverse palette of instruments, most notably vocals and the increased prominence of the electric guitar. The drums rise from a dulcet haze to notability too, swapping sparse, intermittent appearances for a driving force within the music.Maps / Systemalheur is a record which will appeal to both free-jazz enthusiasts and fans of minimalist electronics. The production is great, and the musicianship manages to work well in the cut-and-paste way that Baja works. ____________________________________________________________ ____ JAZZINBELGIUM: Premier album de Daniel Vujanic,multi-instrumentiste et compositeur basé à Stuttgart, « Maps /Systemalheur» est une découverte qui croise les influences et les genres avec talent et fluidité. Maps constitue la première partie de cet opus double. Chacune de ses huit pièces est une suite avec plusieurs dévelop- pements où guitares, traitements électroniques, sons d’ambianceet autres instruments sont subtilement agencés. Daniel Vujanic fait aussi office de chef d’un orchestre amical captivant, à la fois séduisant et étonnant. Il est également mélodiste et arrangeur mature,ayant parfaitement intégré l’héritage post-rock, électronique, mais aussi jazz et contemporain. Systemalheur, l’autre partie – composée de six étapes – de ce diptyque à la fois varié et cohérent (les sections s’enchaînent avec souplesse, comme autant de séquences d’une déambulation « cinémusicale »), est plus rythmique (downtempo façon Tortoise) et s’ouvre sur une pièce elle-aussi composée de sections, dont une enchantée par l’apparition vocale hypnotique de Mariana Vujanic. Mais, nous voici à peine sous le charme que Baja nous projette dans un autre court-métrage sonore avec de délicats entrelacs de guitares électriques et acoustiques. Une révélation et un doux plaisir pour les âmes voyageuses. Et si ce monde était beau...? Philippe Franck ____________________________________________________________ _ THETRIPWIRE: Incredible genre-melting album that deconstructs rock norms ... ___________________________________________________________ GUTSOFDARKNESS.COM:...."Maps/Systemalheur" s'écoute d'une traîte ou ne s'écoute pas. Mieux ; "Maps/Systemalheur" se vit ! Même si le système d'écriture employé par Baja transpire trop le dictat du laptop, l'album n'en est pas pour autant dépourvu d'âme. Les couleurs pastels apportées par les percussions (vibraphone, marimba), la guitare électro-acoustique et les rares cuivres (clarinette, soprano ?) donnent toute sa profondeur à un disque éminemment poétique, cristallisant une rencontre jusque là encore inédite entre Kieren Hebden (Four Tet) et Mark Hollis (Talk Talk). ____________________________________________________________ ___ TINYMIXTAPES.COM:... (maps/systemalheur) is a work that’s somehow entirely friendly and sincerely detached all at once. It’s pretty, twisting, and curiously impalpable, like a ball of feathers. (And, pssst, it’s only a debut). If the indie rock just isn’t getting it done for you anymore, Baja’s enveloping, intangible compositions may be just the guide you need to more engaging musical territory.