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Ak’chamel, “A Mournful Kingdom of Sand” (Akuphone, 2023)

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The latest from this shapeshifting and anonymous southwestern psych duo marks both their return to Akuphone and the first proper follow up to 2020’s landmark The Totemist. To some degree, Ak’Chamel revisit roughly the same distinctive stylistic terrain as their last LP, approximating some kind of otherworldly and psychotropic collision of Sun City Girls and Sublime Frequencies. That said, Ak’Chamel do sound a hell of a lot more like a mariachi band soundtracking a jungle puppet nightmare this time around and that festively macabre vibe suits them quite nicely. The band might see things a little differently themselves, as this album is billed as “a perfect soundtrack for the desertification of our world,” but experiencing this lysergic Cannibal Holocaust-esque mindfuck is probably just the thing for helping someone appreciate the wide-open spaces and solitude of desert life. In keeping with that desert theme, there are plenty of prominent Middle Eastern melodies and instruments on the album, but Ak’Chamel is singularly adept at dissolving regional boundaries (and possibly dimensional ones as well) in their quest for deep, exotic, and oft-uncategorizable psychedelia.

The album opens in deceptively straightforward fashion, as the first minute of “The Great Saharan-Chihuahuan Assimilation” starts with a minor key Spanish guitar and hand percussion vamp. However, subtle signs of unreality gradually creep in (such as the eerie whistle of throat-singing) before the piece blossoms into a spacious and melodic interlude of Tex-Mex-style surf twang. The following “Clean Coal is a Porous Condom” is similarly musical (if unfamiliar), as Ak’Chamel sound like some kind of outernational supergroup trading Latin, Indian, and surf-inspired licks over a pleasantly lurching “locked groove”-style vamp. Both pieces are quite likable, but the album does not start to wade into the psychedelic deep end until the third piece (the colorfully titled “Amazonian Tribes Mimicking The Sound of Chainsaws With Their Mouths”). Unusually, it is a jaunty yet bittersweet accordion-driven piece at its heart, but the central motif is beautifully enhanced by layers of vivid psychotropic sounds (flutes, voices, ululating, eerie whines, pipe melodies), resulting in something that feels like a festive collision between The Wicker Man and a haunted street fair at the edge of the Amazon.

Happily, Ak’Chamel keep that phantasmagoric momentum going without interruption for the remainder of the album. In “Ossuary from the Sixth Extinction,” a mournful banjo-like melody and tropical-sounding percussion lead into a harrowing rabbit hole of curdled pipe melodies, quivering strings, and an immersive mass of chants and howls. Elsewhere, the following “Soil Death Tape Decay II” begins life as dueling Middle Eastern-inspired oud solos over a bed of buzzing drones, but unexpectedly transforms into an obsessively looping melody that passes through various stages of tape destruction as voices wail and ululate around it. “Sheltering Inside a Camel” takes an even more sustained plunge into the hallucinatory (it is the longest piece on the album at nearly 11-minutes), as desert psychedelia, sinister puppet-like voices, throat singing, and a goddamn horn section collide in singularly disorienting fashion.

The album then winds to a close with one last darkly hallucinatory gem, as “The Cabinet of the Atomic Priesthood” unexpected transforms from something resembling choir practice at a demonic cathedral into a sublime coda of slow, exhalation-like chords; flickering mindfuckery; and eerie pipe melodies that fade in and out of focus. Admittedly, Ak’Chamel do exceed my personal bombast tolerance at times (particularly in the closing piece), but they invariably wind up somewhere compelling and it a delight to find them in such melodic and focused form again. As with The Totemist before it, A Mournful Kingdom of Sand makes a rare and ideal entry point into this duo’s oft-prickly, bizarre, and enigmatic oeuvre and affirms once again that they are one of the most consistently fascinating and creative bands in the psych scene right now.

Listen here.

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Ak’chamel, The Giver Of Illness, “Totemist” (Akuphone, 2021)

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This singular album was released back in February 2020 right before the pandemic upended everything, so I sadly never got around to writing about it. I am attempting to right that wrong now, however, as this inscrutable and anonymous Texas duo is the most consistently fascinating psych project around and this album has been in fairly heavy rotation for me since it came out. Granted, “consistently fascinating” is not quite the same thing as “consistently great,” but Totemist is an unusually accessible release for the creepily costumed pair, as this vinyl debut ostensibly “marks a new direction” for the project. 

That mostly just means that these “fourth world post-colonial cultural cannibalists” wrote a more melodic and focused batch of songs than usual and took a break from “the oppressively lo-fi sound” of their previous tapes. Happily. all of those changes suit the band quite well, but Ak’Chamel still basically sound like a haunted, shambling pile of Sun City Girls and Sublime Frequencies albums that has been possessed by the spirit of an ancient shaman. Which, of course, is exactly how I would want them to sound.

It is impossible to speculate on the identity of Ak’Chamel without instantly thinking of the Bishop brothers, as Totemist feels like a perfect blend of Sir Richard’s Eastern-influenced guitar virtuosity and the warped vision and dark humor of Alvarius B. Also, Sublime Frequencies regulars Robert Millis and Mark Gergis are both explicitly involved. Case closed! That said, if the Bishops are behind Ak’Chamel, it only raises more questions (“so why was Ak’Chamel briefly a black metal band?” being one that immediately springs to mind). 

In any case, Totemist would have made a truly killer follow up to Funeral Mariachi regardless of who was involved, as Ak’Chamel are legitimately quite good at making droning, Middle Eastern-inspired desert psychedelia. The real magic of the album, however, lies in how those perfectly good desert-psych jams regularly dissolve like a mirage to reveal something considerably darker, weirder, and more hallucinatory. 

At various points, Totemist calls to mind heavy trance-inducing harmonium drones, a wrong-speed field recording of an ancient tribal ritual, a chorus of sinister puppets, a cannibalized Phurpa album, and a fever dream about an all-Muppet mariachi band. Needless to say, it is a hypnotically creepy and surreal journey indeed, but considerably less nightmarish than some of the duo’s previous releases (parts of which would seem perfectly at home in an evidence bag labeled “Dyatlov Pass Incident” or an alternate reality where The Blair Witch was actively involved in the early 2000s cassette underground). 

There are admittedly still some traces of that dark and murky terrain here, but Totemist is wonderful largely because of how effortlessly and organically the two poles of the bands’ vision bleed into each another like an increasingly malfunctioning reality simulation. If I had to choose a favorite song, I would go with the colorfully titled “The Funeral of a Woman Whose Soul is Trapped in the Sun” or “Phallus Palace,” but Totemist‘s phantasmagoric vision quest is best experienced as a sustained immersion.

Samples can be found here.

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The Gamelan of the Walking Warriors (Akuphone, 2019)

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My fascination with the Sublime Frequencies and Nonesuch Explorer labels goes back many years, but it has been quite a long time since I have been properly floored by a revelatory feat of ethnological scavenging or scholarship. I was starting to worry that my ears had lost their capacity for wonder until this 2017 gem from France’s eclectic Akuphone label belatedly crossed my path. Unsurprisingly, the compiler (Vincenzo Della Ratta) previously surfaced on SF with 2016’s Kwangkay: Funerary Music Of The Dayak Benuaq Of Borneo and this album returns to a similar theme, swapping out the funeral music of Borneo for that of Bali. 

Only part of this album covers field recordings of Balinese funerals, however, as the other half is culled from some truly visceral and mesmerizing rehearsal space recordings of the more contemporary and visionary Dharma Shanti Orchestra. Both sides have certainly their appeal, but it is exclusively the Dharma Shanti material that makes the leap from “this is interesting and unique traditional music” to “this is what I desperately want the music of the future to sound like.”

This album takes its name from the English translation of “gamelan beleganjur,” which is the term for the processional gamelan orchestras common to government ceremonies, Balinese Hindu rituals, and (of course) war. I suspect that Balinese gamelan ensembles have not been inspiring glorious victories on the battlefield much in recent days, so that facet is absent from this collection, as The Gamelan of the Walking Warriors covers the more contemporary state of the form. In fact, that is exactly what interested Della Ratta in the project in the first place, as the bevy of traditional Indonesian gamelan albums available in the West predate the stylistic innovations and evolutions that have occurred over the last three decades. 

I am delighted to say that Della Ratta’s instincts were dead-on, as this album is quite unlike any other gamelan performance that I have heard. As he puts it himself, there is a more “melodious and meditative quality” that is “quite distinct from the spectacular and breathlessly frantic kreasi beleganjur that we are usually offered.” I have no doubt that Della Ratta is right about that, but it does not quite convey the full appeal of these recordings: the reason that the Dharma Shanti recordings sound so revelatory is that they combine that entrancing melodic aesthetic with an impressive degree of sharpness and physicality. There is a violence and jaggedness to crashing, scraping cymbals and pounding drums that makes this a deliciously brutalist and ecstatic take on “meditative.”

The opening “Pemungkah” is a perfect distillation of everything wonderful about these recordings, as it sounds like some kind of occult ritual of visceral, post-apocalyptic junkyard minimalism. The crux of the piece is a simple metallophone melody that hypnotically circles and loops, yet it stays compelling because its harmonic context languorously see-saws between two deeper sustained tones. It is weirdly beautiful in both its unhurried, trancelike repetition and its texture, which resembles a ramshackle collection of tin cans. 

The cymbals are what truly elevate the piece to a thing of genius though, as their scraping rhythm sounds like a roomful of people vigorously sharpening rusty knives in unison. That basic template repeats again and again for the four Dharma Shanti pieces, but the ensemble consistently manages to transform that hyperlimited palette into something wonderfully churning and organic through the ebb and flow of the pounding drums and slicing cymbals.

The second half of the album is a bit more varied and traditional, as Della Ratta recorded some actual ceremonies in the village of Peliang, unexpectedly trading the focused intensity of the first half for something considerably more shapeshifting and surreal. While some of the individual pieces are a bit too busy and cheery for my liking (resembling an out-of-tune music box that is playing too fast), they form a compelling and vivid whole,as the album stops being exclusively about the gamelan and becomes more of an impressionist tour of small village life. 

To some degree, the profound difference between the album’s two halves makes it feel like two different albums have been bizarrely stitched together, yet that strange sequencing actually works in Walking Warriors‘ favor: I love the first half, but the aesthetic is probably too limited to sustain an entire album on its own without diminishing returns.

Amusingly, I first heard this album without knowing anything at all about its background or its participants and immediately assumed that it was the work of fringe-dwelling avant-garde iconoclasts like Alan Courtis or the Volcano The Bear milieu, as it struck my ears as too radical and contemporary to be actual Indonesian gamelan music. Naturally, I felt like a cultural chauvinist jackass upon learning more about the album, but my error makes perverse sense, as Western experimental musicians have been appropriating ideas and themes from Eastern traditional music for so long that the distinctions between the two are not nearly as obvious as they once were. I guess I finally found the place where the mouth and tail of the Ouroboros meet.

Aside from that, I was also struck by how much the aesthetic of the recordist and the quality of the recording impacts albums in this vein, as a tinny/naturalist “field recording” approach can make everything sound bloodlessly academic, while a more produced approach can turn vibrant performances into something that feels toothless and homogenized for Western consumption. To his credit, Dell Ratta managed to capture the Dharma Shanti Orchestra in a raw and explosively Albini-esque way that feels appropriately bracing and vital. The Gamelan of the Walking Warriors may not be a perfect and seamless collection, but the high points are wonderful enough to make that seem irrelevant.

Samples can be found here.