![]() "Smoke Circle" is the track that most consciously plays with the idea of spaced-out future as rootsy apotheosis. The side glance at Kubrick's 2001 on the way to ab-FX future is presumably intentional-the bold new world signaled by bold new worlds past, cemented with more bass bottom. Thus the great video for Folded Edge, with vaguely organic shapes throbbing and spitting in juxtaposition with astral bodies, and semi-solids spewing as some stranded lungfish belches forth its final mournful tune. Similarly, part of the pleasure of Akkord is the way everything seems lost in echoes and space, as if familiar genres and tunes have fallen into a time warp and ended up in some exhausted future, presided over by a bloated, dying sun. ![]() Robert Johnson was as much a commercial artist as Beyoncé-his music was just tied to imagining a world raw enough that the devil was close at hand. Purity isn't about actually being pure though it's about a stance or a dream. "Navigate" throws in some distorted vocal sounds, tying its stunned, itchy beats to a human referent, while the skittery stochastic spurts of "Hex-ad" nod spastically to Aphex Twin and other earlier arty electronica. ![]() "3dOS" is a house/dance track, the beat interrupted by occasional dark burps and slowed-down laser zaps, a heated soundtrack for a shambling Shoggoth, who get woozier and woozier as it goes along. The opening track, "Torr Vale," opens with keyboards and a stuttering heartbeat, reminiscent of Morricone's theme for The Thing, before shifting into industrial clanging, like the alien has taken up metallurgy. Not that Akkord is completely sui generis. Maybe rather than paring back crabwise into the past, music purifies through distillation, cutting away everything that would connect it to physical vibration until you get blank beats in the last abandoned factory on earth. Listening to Akkord's recent self-titled release (Houndstooth), though, you wonder if we've gotten it the wrong way round. Way back there on the crossroads, with one acoustic string and some bleak yodel, is really the core of music, before Coca-Cola put it in a bottle and sold it to all the single ladies. Purity in music: you're thinking about some form of atavistic authenticity a return to a pre-commercial truth, sans autotune or keyboard or even electric guitar.
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