Akufen - My Way

Thursday, October 14, 2004

They call it microhouse. I didn’t know they did. I just thought it’s forward looking house music that happens to sound extremely groovy.

I first found out about Akufen last year when I read about him in somekind of a top ten and then downloaded ‘Deck The House’ the same night. It played for a while in my MP3 player back then and I liked the song a lot but somehow I forgot about it later. But about a month ago I put my hands on the whole album and it’s a great piece of music that got stuck in my earphones for a few weeks now.

If anybody would ask me now how today’s, or better yet, tommorow’s house should sound, I’d say: Akufen like. Checking some reviews on the Internet today, I saw that for some the style was already old and expired back in 2002, but for stupid me it still sounds extremely fresh and groundbreaking.

By the way, Akufen is Marc Leclair from Montreal, Canada and his music can be best described as… Hell, I’m just going to quote this review from Stylus Magazine:

Akufen’s gimmick (if you will allow me to be reductive for a moment) is his use of pick-a-mix radio samples to create melodies. Akufen molds sub-second fragments of pop songs, people talking, and other auditory ephemera into burbling melody lines.

And let me tell you that as chaotic as this might sound it turns out great for him! Oh, and if you have a credit card at hand you can create a trial account at Emusic, guilt freely download the whole album and then still have a bunch of trial credits to check out some of the other great indie stuff of which Emusic is chock full of…