Trio Not Trio: Trzecia

While Siguiente, the second instalment of the Aidan Baker led Trio Not Trio, featured in our latest Weirdo Rippers column, the third, Trzecia, was released a week later in a series that is undoubtably going from strength to strength.

Baker has orchestrated this series by scouring the dark frontiers of experimentalism, drafting in and forming alliances with some of the most obscure sonic purveyors in the underground.

This time, Trzecia sees Baker teaming up with Khanate percussionist, Tim Wyskida and Daron Beck of the Fort Worth, Texas duo, Pinkish Black in what is a doom-laden, avant-jazz odyssey. Clocking in at just over the hour mark, Trzecia is the longest offering in the series so far, and it’s possibly the best, zeroing in with a series of carefully crafted compositions that build with resounding tension, brought about by the uncertainty that collaborations sometimes bring.  

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Wyskida has had some year, as Trzecia comes on the back of Khanate’s emphatic return with their surprise dispatch from the void, To Be Cruel. Alongside Baker and Beck, it’s yet another union of some of the most crucial minds experimental music has to offer.

With a pressure building bass thrum likened to a boiler on the verge of exploding, Pierwsza is a composition you’d expect from The Necks. And the same could said of Drug, with Beck’s echoing keyboard lines anticipating Baker’s dark, metallic echoes. Seemingly the only other person that could make something like this actually work is Chris Abrahams.

Whipping up intoxicating atmospheres, the title track and Czwarta are fractured doom jazz at its finest, with sounds arriving like veils of smoke. Wyskida’s percussion rumbles like a storm that rolls in from hell, backed by Beck’s subtle inflections across the keys, giving both tracks an elusive charm.

Then there’s Piąta – a keyboard-led hypnotic doomscape that evokes the imagery of the post-apocalypse, largely brought about by Baker’s humid basslines that maintain the relevant dose of dread.

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It sets the scene perfectly for the closing stanza, Szósta. In the very heart of a terrain akin to Blade Runner 2049, Baker’s laser beam drone is the kind that cuts you in half. In all its mind-altering sci-fi lustre, it ends Trzecia fittingly.

Through the vast number of Barker’s projects, the Nadja mastermind has built worlds that have always presented startling backdrops, cloaked in different shades and tones of darkness. Through the Trio Not Trio collaboration series, he has created yet another world, and in this instance alongside Wyskida and Beck, he continues to bestow hard-nose experimentalism that maintains that element of surprise.

Trzecia is out now via Gizeh Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.