(2022) Ak'chamel - A Mournful Kingdom of Sand    


Review:
Sociologists use the term “Fourth World” to refer to nations without states and countries within countries. The term is often used to talk about indigenous cultures and sub-populations of First World nations living closer to Third World standards. It is a world of diasporas and exiles, of Zones and border towns instead of cities and states, with their meticulously planned grids and artificial boundaries. It is a place where things get messy, with extensive contact and cross-pollination occurring between any and every culture you can imagine. Whereas First, Second and Third World countries are geographical states, Fourth World nations might be thought of as Nations of the Mind. Ak’chamel are an enigmatic duo who describe themselves as “Fourth World Post-Colonial Cultural Cannibalists,” who, in their own words, are “circumcising the foreskin of enlightenment.” A Mournful Kingdom of Sand is billed as “a perfect soundtrack for the desertification of our world.” As such, its seven trance-inducing drone rock ragas are a patchwork of all the world’s “desert music,” from Middle Eastern Bedouin belly dance beats to Southwestern surf twang. It asks us to imagine what the world might sound like once it’s burned up and swallowed by sand. Although it’s a true creole, A Mournful Kingdom of Sand is weighted towards the Arabic or Middle Eastern. Ouds, doumbeks, tars and Arabic horns are some of the most heavily featured instruments, showing up on nearly every track. The trancey Middle Eastern mysticism is evident from the album’s first moments, with “The Great Saharan-Chihuahuan Assimilation” operating on a backbone of oud and hand percussion. At first, the music is played entirely straight, with an ethnographer’s attention to detail. Then things start to get surreal, with a backdrop of Gregorian chant giving way to a bouncy African marimba melody which, in turn, is replaced by a twangy surf guitar. It brings to mind some pan-cultural desert zone like you might see on Tatooine, with a cast of masked and hooded seers playing bone flutes and surf guitars beneath strange stars while burning heady herbs and praying for rain. “Clean Coal is a Porous Condom” is also relatively straightforward, with a loping, looping oud melody and locked-groove polyrhythm joined by what sounds like a sitar, which then drops out in favor of atonal flutes and squawking fifes. It’s a reminder that despite a knack for naming and an evocative concept, Ak’chamel, The Giver Of Illness don’t need any gimmicks to make incredible music. Middle Eastern music, in general, doesn’t need any bells and whistles or frills, either; Its Minor Keys and Persian modes more than stand up on their own. Ak’chamel, The Giver Of Illness just so happen to make excellent Middle Eastern music, wherever they hail from. They could release an album of nothing but straight-ahead Arabic music and, judging from the strength of these first two tracks, it would be outstanding. This is not an attempt at cultural forgery, though. From here on out, A Mournful Kingdom of Sand gets progressively stranger. “Amazonian Tribes Mimicking the Sound of Chainsaws With Their Mouths” (another excellent title) starts out conventionally enough, with an irregular hypnotic rhythm and repetitive accordion melody. These traditional elements are layered with ethnographic field recordings, though, making it sound like some group of street musicians from a bazaar in Marrakech. This chattering ambiance is joined by Les Baxter-esque bird calls, exotica as heard through heat stroke and delirium. “Ossuary from the Sixth Extinction” is pure Middle Eastern trance music, all shrieking horns and temple drums, but it gets progressively more demented and warped as it wears on, with guttural chanting and wailing ambient choirs rising like a sandstorm, which are then degraded and corroded like a tape that’s been buried for decades and then left to rot in the sun. A similar feat is performed on “Soil Death Tape Decay II,” which is also relatively straightforward with its repetitive oud melody and doumbek beat, which also degrades and decays into lo-fi scuzz. It all comes to an epic head on the 10:49-long “Sheltering Inside a Camel,” which acts as a kind of master cut of the rest of the album. It’s all here: the odd-metered oud; the blasting, blatting horns; the ghostly field recordings of incantatory chanting. If you’re looking for an entry point for Ak’chamel, The Giver Of Illness, the closer would be an excellent pick. It’s also likely to sound the most familiar, as its druggy, droney hypnotic Middle Eastern beats and melodies bear a strong resemblance to the works of Sqürl and Jozef van Wissem from the soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive. It also effectively suggests that you don’t need a lot of special effects for music to be psychedelic. A Mournful Kingdom of Sand is heavy and heady as a hit of hashish, causing your eyes to roll up into your skull all on its own, no intoxication required. A Mournful Kingdom of Sand, along with 2020’s equally-excellent The Totemist, features cover art depicting a primitive mask, like an artifact from some unknown distant land. These masks, and their records, seem to serve as some kind of fetish, filling their owners with strange visions and unsettling portents. The desert vistas that fill your head when you listen to these seven songs may seem like myth or science fiction, but they also hit frighteningly close to home, whispering, “unless you take drastic action now, these burning visions and devouring sands are our future. — spectrumculture.com


   


Track List:
01 - The Great Saharan-Chihuahuan Assimilation
02 - Clean Coal Is a Porous Condom
03 - Amazonian Tribes Mimicking the Sound of Chainsaws with Their Mouths
04 - Ossuary from the Sixth Extinction
05 - Soil Death Tape Decay II
06 - Sheltering Inside a Camel
07 - The Cabinet of the Atomic Priesthood


Media Report:
Genre: psychedelic rock, world
Country: France
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)


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