Tiny glitch magic sexy movement disk – Akufen’s ‘My Way’
My dear pals at the excellent Kaput Magazine in Cologne have been asking around for essential albums that have somehow defined the first quarter century that we find ourselves in. Music journalism having also had ‘a bit of a time’ in those same two and a half decades, this was no easy task. Does anyone need a hot take on old LPs at this point? Or maybe that’s the whole purpose of music writing, given the time-is-a-flat-circle strangeness we find ourselves in.
Anyway, it’s always nice to be asked to go off and think about your passions, right? The question was interesting in another way – given the skittery and broken attention spans we now have and the slow depreciation of the album as a format in the era of streaming platforms. This was a question about what Kaput’s editors refer to as deep listening. However, one weapons-grade Australian-assembled coffee later and the answer was obvious: Akufen’s ‘My Way’.
Looking back is inherently about time, about somehow revisiting the people we were, recapturing the way we responded, the excitement we felt. Music gave us a shared language, pidgin-spoke perhaps, but always a way to traverse strange new worlds. And the last 25 years neatly encapsulates something important: the bit before social media. The bit when we weren’t really the centre of ourselves.
Albums were always totems of specialist knowledge, of accidental endeavour, tribal arrivals. We gave them our attention (remember that?), attempted to understand, surrendered our hearts, hips and feet. Your relationship with art, with stunning or surprising new things from music or film, just sat with you. On a good day, it hit you hard.
‘My Way’ – the debut album by Canada’s Marc Leclair (Akufen - a play on the French word Acouphène [tinnitus – fun fact: a thing I now suffer from! The world is a self-manifesting circle!]) came out in 2002. And it was immediately obvious it was one of those instant, unexpected classics – a piece of work that seems to be rewriting the book you thought you knew, while you hear it for the first time.
Who doesn’t love to wiggle?
‘My Way’ remains a unique masterpiece of danceable, surreal sound design. Funny, cool, precise, somehow utterly determined. It is unlike any other record I can think of. Leclair’s genius ability to glom together unlikely samples remains unmatched. It’s an album about music making while being an album of music making, if that makes sense.
The record is cinematic in its journey from plangent, almost laboratory-at-twilight atmosphere, before morphing into the messiest kind of vodka party with a bunch of Disney movie rejects by its close. It’s an LP that’s never given up its mystery – an orchestration of insanely fun fragments assembled by a master craftsman. It might be just one record, but it set the bar for a kind of witty, sexy knowingness that dance music needs to revisit and refresh every few years or so.
Anyway! I’m getting ahead of myself. To read more of my ramblings on this essential thing, do visit Kaput’s brilliant ongoing ‘25’ series – it’s our quarter-of-the-game scorecard and you’re all just as guilty as I am.
Read: “Pardon me, but it’s a masterpiece…”
Post-script: for rights reasons, the album is kind of hard to find (gah) although you can bag yourself a CD on Discogs naturlich. 🎶 There is a YouTube playlist that no one seems to have objected to right there though:
