Ian Mathias Baker’s latest collection of compositions is an eerily dystopian and grim display of a composer’s profound vision for his work. A 6-piece collection that revolves around the mystic, blending classical textures with electronic soundscapes, creating experimental fusions that puzzle and draw like little else we’ve ever come across.
Specific Gravity is the title of Ian Mathias-Baker’s latest album. Mathias-Baker is a Hereford-based composer whose artistic tendencies are all over the place, in the most wholesome of ways. A man capable of chill out, remixing hip hop, doing pop and rock, classical, and glitchy electronica, Ian Mathias-Baker is guaranteed to surprise. Specific Gravity, a work inspired by classical music, featuring poetic retellings of Bukowski’s iconic Man Mowing the Lawn Across the Way and T.S.Eliot’s ominous The Hollow Men, among 4 instrumentals called Mythic Texts and numbered 1-4, is a quizzical release with superb, desolate beauty drawn from the harrowing string arrangements, alien soundscapes, and unsettling incursions of electronica.
Unquestionably experimental, Specific Gravity was not made for everybody, and will readily not be digestible by everybody. On the other hand, those of us able to see Mathias-Baker’s work for what it is will gain immense value from each little detail carefully stowed away in this collection’s 6 pieces. ‘Mythic Texts 1-4’ are classical pieces defined by grandiose, glacial strings and potent melancholy. Meandering and soaring, the Mythic Text instill a sense of mystery that does nothing short of driving this collection forward, enticing curiosity and calling for interpretation, but it is the two spoken word pieces that need a deliberate pause and a careful examination. ‘Man Mowing the Lawn’ features a stunning piano performance that’s mystical and elegantly dark. The arpeggios are haunting and the chord sequences, with their insistent toying with dissonance, managed to capture the entirety of my attention, draw me into a gorgeously colored world, that is quite alien and empty, with the distant retelling of the melancholic, poetic lines as my only company.
The loneliness of ‘Man Mowing the Lawn..’ is matched, and raised upon by the alarmingly titled ‘This is the Way the World Ends. A mesmerizing surprise awaits in this piece. One that I will not dare spoil. This treatment of Eliot’s timeless poem features a unique twist that managed to create a whole new perspective to the way the world ends, managing also to get be wholeheartedly onboard the Mathias-Baker ship.
There’s a lot of beauty and value to be discovered on Specific Gravity. At 15 minutes long, it is hardly a challenging listen, as while it is quite experimental, none of the textures or the compositions are necessarily gritty or difficult. Instead, Mathias-Baker’s experiments are short, often quite sublime listens that sound delightfully like nothing else with their ice-cold timbres and slowly wandering structures. And with two exquisitely smart pieces of spoken poetry, Specific Gravity proved itself as a truly intoxicating listen.