Akala – The end of the beginning

I did not know Akala yet, though I know there is also a British rapper with that name. But this Akala is released through Fin de Siècle Media, so I guess we’re dealing with harsh industrial or cold ambient here. I read that Akala is a Lithuanian multimedia artist who has released the album “Delicate Instruction” on RRRecords and contributed music to the dance performance “Extremum Mobile”. He is also linked to ‘naj’, who had a CD on Pure before.

‘The end of the beginning’ offers us three long noisy soundscapes. The conceptual theme of this work is ‘the ever changing flow which re-incarnates the soul; transmigration’. The sound is dense and repetitive. When after a few minutes the music of ‘The end’ slows down it comes as a treat. Before that I felt like standing on an airport between planes with their engines running on full speed. The dense noise is followed by a twisted psychedelic part with a strangily distorted voice with a demonic effect. I have to think of heads turning around and ‘The Exorcist’. Then some jazzy sounds and a soulful female voice enter the sonic picture, before being crushed under a new wall of raw oldschool industrial, with radio sounds, loops and noises sounding like machineguns.

‘Of’ has a more tranquil and minimal idiom, but is not much easier to digest, with some high frequencies, distant muffled sounds and very slowly developing pace. ‘The beginning’ with deep drones and heavy feedback and extreme japnoise-like distorted vocals gives me a rather apocalyptic feel. For some reason I have to think of Vietnam, of being chased through the jungle while bombarded with napalm. In other words, a quite intense release.

artist: Akala
label: Fin de Siècle Media
details: mcd, 3 tracks, 30 min. released March 2004.