Baja

When you have a fully stocked kitchen, there is sometimes that drunken impulse to improvise, to try out new ingredients and reinvent time-tested recipes. Daniel Vujanic is a German chef with a musical pantry chock-full of sounds, from jazz to pop to electronics and beyond. On this third release under his Baja pseudonym, he stirs things up, unleashing frequencies and fragrances that place Wolfhour in the court of the Books or even Jaga Jazzist for its expert blending of organic and inorganic elements. Vujanic exhibits a high degree of restlessness in his themes, constantly introducing new fragments and instrumentation, sometimes before their initial flavour is digested. This tenacious push forward does yield a detail rich series of pieces that find new ways of imagining everything from free jazz to ’70s excesses in rock. For example, the suite of "Go Wolpertinger! Go!,” "Djilas Plus” and "Bous Makel” could just as easily be adapted for an Emerson Lake and Palmer album as for Aphex Twin. Whether Baja achieves a new taste sensation will likely depend on how challenged the listener allows his/her palate to be, but it won’t fail for lack of spice.