Acharné
Innocence and Suburbia – Student Is Teacher Remixes
Seppüku Records
Pro tip: if you plan to write about metal or experimental music, learn all the Word key strokes for è, é, ö, and ö. It really pays off. Here’s a notable example: In French “Acharné” means “furious” but drop the accent grave and it reduces to simply “Hounds”. Subtle, but that’s what’s going on here. Note that this music is neither furious nor hound like; it’s the slowly throbbing experimental sound that could go into a documentary or a Disney jungle pre-show or an acid tripping visual sequence. These five tracks consisting of a stand-alone titled “The Child,” the title track “Innocence and Suburbia” and three remixes of the title. I grooved these tracks late at night, that seem the best way to appreciate these spacey, “Night Flight” feeling experience.
“Innocence and Suburbia” begins with its quiet yet urgent rhythm hiding under yet influencing an ethereal tone poem of sparse chords and a female voice edits and remixed. We don’t know who she is other than another charming and mysterious electronic lady who chants “coming…take me…” and so we are deep in the gravitational field of re-ignited 1980s space music. At its halfway point there’s is what might, in another genre, be considered a “drop.” A single drum tap pauses the music a beat, and then it takes up its slithery old ways. The remixes recalculate the route but not the destination. The “Microlot Remix” feels colder and darker, it’s a journey on a late-night train crossing the border just before it closes for a war. “Benefield” takes a more sci-fi path, it’s as if there’s a nanobot inside the synthesizer retuning it at random moments. And the “Kcin remix” aims for a more industrial sound evoking the old Berlin scene of weeklong raves in abandoned Soviet era factories. You’ll hear some decent work here, even if the experience is over just as you really begin to dig it.
