Shield Patterns & Aidan Baker at Acud Macht Neu! / Monday, 30.03.2015

Shield Patterns, the Manchester-based duo of Claire Brentnall and Richard Knox, create intense, infectious and incredibly detailed dark-pop music.

Debut album ‘Contour Lines’ was released in June 2014 via Gizeh Records and has gathered heavy praise from the press including a five star review from The Skinny magazine.

httpv://https://youtu.be/F5LOJonaDc8

The project started life in late 2012 with Brentnall working alone on a bunch of home recorded demos. A chance meeting with Knox at her first ever solo show was enough to form an interest in working together in some capacity.

Just a few months later and the duo were performing live together whilst also working on the beginnings of new material that would finally form the debut album. After retiring to the wilderness and isolation of the North Wales countryside, that album was finally complete. The following months saw a host of live dates and in March 2015 the duo release a new EP entitled ‘Violet’.

httpv://https://youtu.be/MIKjWhJSXbM

There is a resolutely unique sound to the music Shield Patterns make. A lush, fragile and rich soundworld… like falling – slowly, gracefully, and not without hope, but still falling; a white shape in the darkness tumbling downwards.

One live review suggests that Shield Patterns; ‘Borrow the dense, yet richly stratified compositions from masters of rippling electronic realms like Actress, Forest Swords and even (at times) Joy Orbison and marry them to effortlessly avant-garde vocals that sound like Kate Bush calling out to you from the unknown extents of of a whirling vortex’. Not far from the mark indeed.

httpv://https://youtu.be/l_BHMWOI7vk

An accomplished writer and musician, Aidan Baker has his artistic fingers in many pies. He is a multi-instrumentalist, classically-trained in flute, but best known as a guitarist.

Using various electronic effects combined with prepared and/or alternate methods of playing the guitar, he creates music which falls within the ambient/experimental genres but draws on influences from shoegaze and post-rock, contemporary classical and jazz.

httpv://https://youtu.be/HvL6MuwFZkg

Over the course of the last decade, Baker has released numerous recorded works, both solo, with his duo Nadja, and various other group projects on such labels as Alien8 Recordings, Important Records, Die Stadt Musik, and Broken Spine Productions. He is also the author of several books of poetry.

Baker has collaborated in-studio and live with such artists as Tim Hecker, Carla Bozulich, Jessica Baillif, Noveller, OvO, members of The Jesus Lizard, and members of Swans.