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.

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The new album sees you take a different direction to previous release Tempatempat, it seems a lot more focussed and direct. Is this the result of a conscious effort to do something different? Or is it simply the evolution of your musical career?

This was deliberate. I had felt it was time to take the reigns a bit in regards to my music and I wrote 9 songs and endlessly worked on them until they reached their final forms. This is different from how I normally work, usually with no set outline, and when a song is done it is done, and I can move on. For Bahar I knew early on it would be 9 tracks. Not sure how I knew this, the number just felt right. Some of the songs like ‘Tone Offering’ or ‘Tennis’ went through
literally forty-fifty versions. It was a somewhat nerve-wracking process but ultimately very rewarding. Perhaps I’ll continue to work this way in the future.

Was this increase in focus/structure an attempt to make your music a little more approachable? To me this seems apparent not just in terms of your beatwork but also in terms of your vocals and their lyrical content.

I definitely focused more on Bahar as pop songs, and tried to include memorable choruses. Also on Tempatempat, the vocals are very woven and a part of the texture, which can be exhausting/burn out the mind, so for Bahar I wanted a clear delineation of vocal foreground and instrumental background, with very little vocal doubling and extremely blunt beats. I think my processes are pretty intricate and personal regardless of what I do, so striving for simplicity and accessible structure still resulted in some odd shapes.

Your previous albums felt organic and intuitive, but on Bahar you have returned to your formal musical education. Why have you decided to make this shift now? And why have you refrained from drawing upon your education until now?

I was burnt out on music theory after leaving school, and I felt that instead of trying to pull something out of me, the school was trying to shove all of these “shoulds” into me. So I completely left it behind when I started my solo work. The original blueprint for my solo material was no instruments allowed: voice and samples only. Slowly I began to include instruments, and, with this record, ended up scoring for woodwinds: clarinet, oboe, flute and bass clarinet. It is extremely rewarding to create something going purely with the flow and intuiting what should happen, but it is equally satisfying to compose something that can be replicated exact.

Like with Tempatempat, the album title is open to interpretation, with multiple meanings depending on the language it is translated into. Is this more than a coincidence, and if so, what interests you in this duality of meaning?

I think it’s an attempt at universality. I try and pick a word that means more than one thing always. With this record, I had a lot of Turkish/sufi music in mind at the outset and it wasn’t until later I was on wikipedia and I realized the clarinet has a significant role in turkish music. Up until that point my inspiration had largely been flute/drum pieces (which most clearly influenced ‘Sunlight, Fruit Trees’). The synchronicity there was rewarding, I don’t think of it as a coincidence, more as mystical reinforcement from the universe.

Bahar can be translated into both Turkish and Maltese, while previous releases have had titles in English, Polish and Hindi. How do you achieve this global inspiration? Do you find yourself listening to music from a wide variety of countries/cultures? And is travel something that is important to your music?

I have been listening to music across the globe from a young age, everything from Oumou Sangare to Oud music to Chinese opera, so I’ve always been very open to scales and tones beyond what western civilization offers. More often than not the music is much more chromatic, and for me, more personally enriching.

Finally, could you list five bands or artists who you have been enjoying recently?

Michael Burns, A-Symmetry, Tyondai Braxton, Yoko Ono, Nat Baldwin

Bahar is due for release at the beginning of May on Bit-Phalanx. We’ve been lucky enough to hear a promo copy and can confirm it’s really good, so stay tuned for pre-order details.

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