Ak’chamel, The Fireblack Breechclouts Hides and Wagonsheets - Spiritually Unemployed (Self Release) [Psychedelic]
- The Slow Music Movement
- 3 minutes ago
- 1 min read
*** This blog post first appeared in TSMM's June 7th Newsletter, where you can get all the tips (and more) first ***
Speaking of trips, you better buckle up for this one - I always do when Ak’chamel drops a new release, but you might already have suspected that just from the cover and track titles. Ak’chamel is a shadowy figure(s?) with many aliases, who has every oddball musician south of Portland in his phone to help him melt minds at live shows.
Spiritually Unemployed is a great album title, but even more impressive is that Savage dragged time-worn and distressed recording equipment along America’s southern border to “harvest the psychic weight of migration, abandonment, and geopolitical limbo“. I’m also happy to report that instruments were damaged during the recording, throat nodules bled, tapes were buried, exhumed and finally tortured, and erratic hot-wired power sources embraced for their sound-warping benefits, all whilst local Fourth World resistance groups watched on curiously, occasionally joining in on sun-warped string instruments and beating out rhythms on the rusting remanents of long-abandoned cars.
If you ever wanted to know what late-Anthropocene, post-societal breakdown tribal rituals will sound like, now you do.
Playlist Companion
Find Ak’chamel in the Slow Psychedelic Playlist.