(Andy Synn handles hosting duties for our premiere of the new collaborative album from Fawn Limbs & Nadja)
The last few years have undoubtedly blessed us with a number of phenomenally creative collaborations between artists whose creativity and talent is absolutely unquestionable.
From Cult of Luna & Julie Christmas to Oranssi Pazuzu & Dark Buddha Rising to Mizmor & Thou – and many more besides – the fruits of these labours has often (though not always… Lulu anyone?) resulted in a collective whole far greater than the sum of its parts.
And now its the turn of Fawn Limbs & Nadja to combine their forces.
While the idea of the two bands collaborating like this might seem, at first glance, like an odd one – indeed, the story of how their partnership came about is full of unlikely coincidences and unexpected connections – in hindsight it seems, almost, like an inevitability waiting to happen.
After all, Fawn Limbs (aka Eeli Helin and Lee Fisher) have never been afraid of injecting their Blackened Math-Grind (patent-pending) with passages of gloomy ambience (2021’s Darwin Falls in particular being a prime example of this), while Nadja (aka Aidan Baker and Leah Buckareff) are well known for blending their experimental Drone-Doom soundscapes with moments of harrowing heaviness, so it makes sense that the two acts would, eventually, ending up meeting somewhere in the middle likes this.
With compositional duties shared pretty much equally between the two bands – some tracks first put together by Fawn Limbs and then further manipulated by Nadja, and vice versa (I’ll leave it to you to guess which tracks were initially written by which group) – the final result is an album which pushes both artists even further towards the extremes, with tracks like “Black Body Radiation Curve” and “Distilled In Observance” bursting out of the speakers in a cascading feedback loop of self-sustaining savagery and ugly, recursive noise.
At the same time, there are also moments where the collision of these two opposing forces results not in the expected explosion but in something altogether stranger, with the mid-album pairing of “Redshifted / Blueshifted” in particular seeming to stretch and bend both space and time in ways that feel decidedly non-Euclidean.
The collaborative nature of this endeavour even extends to its subject matter, with Baker and Bukareff‘s more existential examinations of the cosmic cornucopia interwoven with Heelin and Fisher more introspective musings on what it is to be a finite being in the face of infinity, with lines such as “The formidable void it howls in abundance / Our ails are trivial, our existence is nil” (from climactic, and utterly fantastic, closer “Metastable Ion Decay”) being capable of read either as an expression of awed acceptance or nihilistic despair, depending upon what angle you look at them from.
A word of warning: Vestigial Spectra is decidedly not an easy listen. Even at its most overtly atmospheric it retains a viscerally abrasive edge, while its more chaotic moments are often enveloped in a claustrophobic cloud of squalling noise that serves to make the whole experience even more unfriendly to the ears. And yet there are layers of unusual structure, moments of oddly affecting ambience, and threads of virulent anti-melody buried deep throughout the record, just waiting to be discovered by those willing, and able, to dig a little further.
Access our exclusive stream of Vestigial Spectra right here:
Vestigial Spectra will be released on November 24 via Roman Numeral (US, Vinyl, CD) and Wolves And Vibrancy (EU, Vinyl). The album will also be distributed via Crucible Art in Australia and get a tape release from Sludgelord Records. Order your copy now.