Malign Seeds documents the remote collaboration of Swedish, Gothenburg-based electronics and noise manipulator Joachim Nordwall (the head of iDEAL Recordings, of the avant-rock Skull Defects, and a frequent collaborator of Mats Gustafsson) and American, Vashton-based (in Washington) guitarist, vocalist, and electronics player Aaron Turner (of the avant-metal SUMAC), conducted between 2021 and 2024.
Nordwall and Turner’s experimental sonic journey lacked a premeditated methodology, focusing instead on corroding and disrupting timbral familiarity without melody or rhythmic patterns. The seven pieces juggle glacial slabs of white noise rippling with roiling beds of distortion, electronic storms, and drones that summon spirits from the void, alongside deformed, throaty, and threatening sludge-metal grunts. Nordwall and Turner recommend playing these pieces as loudly as possible, if possible, for an audience of geological formations on a distant planet, or in isolation. Never with other people, never in daylight.
Surprisingly, the pieces have a suggestive, at times even hypnotic cinematic quality—most of the time a nightmarish one—and as Turner articulates it, «where something may be familiar and human, but also seemingly conjured from elsewhere and devoid of the comfort that comes with familiarity». It sounds as if coming from afar, from a distant, barren galaxy, but in its merciless, uncompromising way, it tells us some bitter truths about the current state of our world.
Eyal Hareuveni
Joachim Nordwall (synthesizers, drum machine), Aaron Turner (guitar, vocals, electronics)
