As a bassist, improvisor and songwriter, Rochester’s Nat Baldwin has been releasing music since 2003, building up a sizeable solo oeuvre as well as spending many years as a core member of Dirty Projectors. The breadth of this work is extraordinary, and it has often defied simple genre tags. Records like Enter the Winter, People Changes and In the Hollows leant towards chamber pop and indie folk, pushing close to the distinctive Dirty Projectors style, while others like debut Solo Contrabass occupied a more abstract and improvisational space. But what links Baldwin’s work is his subscription to the avant garde spirit, displaying a continued commitment to experimentation no matter which direction the work takes.
In 2020, Nat Baldwin released the AUTONOMIA series, a project that saw him pivot away from the folk-adjacent style and return to the more challenging brand of improvisation that marked his early releases. Informed by Antonin Artaud, AUTONOMIA I: body without organs purposefully featured defective instruments to push the boundaries of sound and texture. Baldwin followed these enforced limitations to their very core, emerging with something special. Avant garde art in its more successful form, where labels of ‘difficult’ or ‘challenging’ are banished through the work’s intuitive power. A line into primal parts of the brain, where complications and accepted orders are banished. Where revolutionary potential sits latent and waiting, and sound registers as a physical thing.
This summer sees Nat Baldwin return with a brand new record, Common Currents. To be released via Dear Life Records, the album sees Baldwin again change direction, returning to the rich sound and linear structures which were so conspicuously absent from last year’s releases. The experimentation is still very much present, built around pulsing rhythms and his characteristically malleable vocal range, but the songs are marked by a sense of intimacy. If the AUTONOMIA series represented some atavistic, almost pre-human space, then Common Currents is its human counterpoint. An album not at odds with the insurrectionary spirit of previous releases, but offering a view of the people who must hold and live and suffer it every day.
Today we’re delighted to share the lead single and opening track of Common Currents, ‘All We Want Is Everything’. The song typifies the album’s compassion and vulnerability, both through the tenderness of the vocal delivery and the enveloping warm of the double bass. The playfulness of AUTONOMIA is retained but the inherent violence stripped away. Replaced instead by a hospitable sincerity, a dedicated attempt to conjure what might be possible with communal action and imagination. Later tracks on the album might explore left-wing melancholia, but for now we can hope and we can dream.
