by Khagan Aslanov (@virgilcrude)
There’s an affectation that courses through certain parts of the musical fringe, where an artist or group’s oft-used descriptors perfectly capture what the listener might be in for. In that, they mirror the best of kitschy B-movies. There’s little doubt what films with titles like Attack of the Crab Monsters or The Blob might give you. So it goes for Houston, Texas duo Ak’chamel, Giver of Illness. The group, who have never revealed their identity, have spent years building out one of the most singular catalogues in experimental music, a strange and enthralling fusion of found sound, psychedelia, neo-folk and the deepest, eeriest recesses of the avant-garde. And their tagline of “Fourth World post-colonial cultural cannibalism” is about as faithful as an indicator can get in what you’re about to step into.
This spirit of obscene consumption is what the group took with them as they embarked on writing and recording their newest release, Spiritually Unemployed. Most every detail of creating the record was usurped and altered by a purposefully warping ritual. At conception, they wrote in a makeshift studio on the US-Mexico border, a space that has long since become both the apex of liminal existence and a geopolitical epicentre of historic and human ruin. They played using a gallery of invalid instruments—a half-broken oud, a hurdy-gurdy on the brink of collapse, reeds that have been sodden in desert-sourced liquids to create mutated timbres, self-made spike fiddles that have been detuned to the point where pitch discrepancies beat against each other at cataclysmic rates. Tracking was done using a malfunctioning generator, which caused erratic voltage drops and mid-take fluctuations. And if that wasn’t enough in shaping this suffering golem, the dubbed tapes were then buried in arid sand to induce and capture an erosive state.
All this agony is acutely felt in every note as the record plays on, and each track seems like it’s coming apart at the seams on an atomic level. A shockingly beautiful, celestial organ punctuates the sun-scorched march of “Dreams of a Bad Dreamer,” a tense contrast, which is then shattered as the piece enters its droning, processed run-out. The rhythmic pulse of “Paramasturbatory Delusions” is given a ruptured effect through abraded sound effects procured from night hikes through the landscape. The already spectral composition of closer “My Little Pony Apocalypse Diorama Playset” sounds even more haunted, a result of the duo running the tape through sandpaper-covered capstans to create stifling compression levels.
If all this sounds like colossal amounts of torture to inflict on a recording, it all feeds into Ak’chamel’s thematic goal. The album’s overarching narrative is one of near-constant geopolitical turmoil, a sustained atmosphere of uncertainty and unease. And while this music might track as “freak folk” or “avant-chanson” at surface level, the amount of decaying nuance Ak’chamel put into it turn these ceremonials into something much more malevolent, as anxious as it is thrilling.
In truth to both their enigmatic nature and the inconsolable collective grief they attempt to capture, with Spiritually Unmployed, Ak’chamel gather to deliver a sacrificial offering that brings peace to no one.