Nordwall + Turner "Malign Seeds" LP (Exclusive edition w/o-card slipcase) *PRE-ORDER*

There was no premeditated methodology in place when Swedish electronics manipulator Joachim Nordwall and American guitar mangler Aaron Turner decided to collaborate on an album together. Initial experiments involved Turner submitting improvised guitar compositions to Nordwall for dissection and reassembly. While these exercises yielded interesting returns, the project truly began to bloom when Nordwall pitched several beat-oriented tracks for Turner’s perusal. Beginning from a place of structure and finding ways to corrode and disrupt the patterns proved to be a more satisfying tactic than molding chaos into something resembling cohesive form. And it was from this approach that Turner-Norwall’s Malign Seeds album took shape.

It's difficult to pin down the point of genesis on any of Malign Seeds’ seven tracks. The album opens with glacial slabs of white noise rippling with roiling beds of distortion, erasing nearly any distinction between electronics and guitar. As the album progresses into tracks like “The Bath,” we hear more of a call-and-response between the two creative masterminds. An electronic bass pulse and sparse notes on guitar ring out as if summoning spirits from the void. Howling drones of indeterminant origin rise and fall out of the ether, like a chorus of tongue-less beings searching each other out with song-like sonar.

There’s something almost resembling a damaged rock song on “Regulator,” with Nordwall’s alien electronic beat providing a bedrock for Turner’s deformed guitar contortions and throaty grunts, groans, and whispers. “These may be rock songs, and even meant to be played loudly,” the duo muses, “but maybe only for an audience of geological formations on a distant planet. Or in isolation. Never with other people, never in daylight.” As Malign Seeds crawls towards the end of side one with “Saline Cast,” this deconstructed approach feels increasingly deliberate: melody is eliminated, rhythm is constantly ignored if not outright subverted, timbral familiarity is avoided at all costs. What’s left is a hollowed-out shell of rock music—the scrape of the pick across the strings without any of the harmonic information, the whirr and clatter of electronics without the placating carving away of unwanted frequencies, the rasp of the voice without the underlying melody, the warts and blemishes without the defining contours.

Side two continues to be laden with pronounced purpose but bereft of the kind of cultural sonic shorthand that immediately informs the listener of what they should be feeling. This isn’t just music stripped naked, this is music where everything but the marrow of the bones has been excised, leaving the listener with something meaty and very much alive, but left to us to construe its definitive shape. “It’s of constant interest to me to try to capture the feeling of dreams—where something may be familiar and human, but also seemingly conjured from elsewhere and devoid of the comfort that comes with familiarity,” Turner explains. “That was very much a part of the intention in terms of what the music should be and feel like when complete—made by humans, but not warmly human music, neither accessible nor logical in the context of our daily lives.”

Whether the xenomorphic sounds of Turner-Nordwall’s Malign Seeds represent the grisly meat or the scraped-out husk of the 21st century’s niche permutations of rock music is ultimately an exercise in language. Perhaps it’s the most basic incarnation of living matter—primordial cells embedded with the code for a more sophisticated manifestation. Perhaps it really is just a shell—the hardiest and most resilient elements of something that is ultimately fallible and prone to decay. Or perhaps the answer is in the name of the album itself—a kernel containing multitudes for anyone patient enough to give it time to grow, or anyone brave enough to face the potentially malevolent force nestled within.