“Instead, its primary concern is simple aesthetic beauty, the way a small and specific combination of sounds, carefully arranged but given room to breathe, can have a deep emotional impact.”
I don’t want to be a hater on Mark Richardson’s review of Balam Acab because it’s pretty thoughtful. But as I read this sentence, I said to myself, ‘In other words, “music”’, and then the next two sentences said basically that. So yes, this music sounds a lot like music. Plus, it tries to please the ear. In other words, it’s not obnoxious and super witch house-y. Thanks for the solid, Balam Acab.
I have two physical experiences with Balam Acab. The first was that I wandered into Other Music because I had not been in a music shop in so damn long. I actually Google Maps’ed it, and got on the subway, and accidentally went to the old location before finding the new one. I ended up making like four laps and buying a jazz DVD and the Balam Acab EP. I brought it home, and I learned that my old MacBook’s superdrive had stopped working. I ended up having to torrent the EP to listen to it. It ended up sounding a lot like witch house meets an aviary. It probably wasn’t worth all the work to listen to it.
A few weeks ago, I think I saw Balam Acab at PS1 (when Clams Casino, uh, ‘performed’, too). It was literally impossible to tell just by listening. You couldn’t (I couldn’t) differentiate between the in-between-set music and the actual slated-to-perform music. There was a lot of witch house. It was like a Tri-Angle Records showcase. None of the performances really sounded like music. Or, maybe, all of it was very unmusical, but it tried for the conventionality of music. Like, it was a lot of sounds and moans and synth patches guided by an intelligence that was aware of the concept of music. Like a highly mediated aesthetic experience that was intended to be music. I said at the time that it sounded ‘like all the worst parts of Nine Inch Nails’. Of course, I don’t know which set I was talking about, or even if it was supposed to be ‘concert music’. It was all sort of terrible, I’ll admit.
This Balam Acab album is an update of those Chilltronica Chill Out Totally Breezy Ibiza Edition megamixes that actually had TV commercials from back when they advertised things like that on TV. It’s not very sophisticated or interesting. It’s new age music. It’s pretty good new age music. I guess I kind of like new age music. But make no mistake, it’s new age music. It’s hard to distinguish from music that’s meant to be played as simple filler music at a concert.
I suppose I’ll conclude where Richardson’s review nearly concludes: ‘This is functional music that highlights the simple pleasure of artfully arranged sound’, which, again, seems sort of tautological. ‘Artfully arranged sound’ seems to be saying ‘music’ with a few more words. The Balam Acab album isn’t bad, but it’s sort of thing, and representative of a very thin sensibility of music making. I’m not down on bedroom production-type electronic/chillwave music, but it is sort of… the antithesis of visceral. It’s a highly refined, Kantian sort of reality. It’s not the chunky reality of unconditioned experience. I think that’s why I don’t like it very much.
In any case, Balam Acab seem, sort of significantly, to represent a new aesthetic in music. Richardson was very perceptive in picking out this aspect of their album.
