Balam Acab is Alec Koone, from Pennsylvania, whose electronic compositions emerged a couple of years ago alongside the short-lived witch house movement; but it’s also the name of a bow-wielding Mayan rain god. It seems appropriate therefore that Wander / Wonder, Koone’s first full-length release (well, it’s over half an hour long) has a fluidity about it: it’s a slow-moving subterranean river of an album, which takes time to gather its full force.
The first half of Wander / Wonder is a frustrating listen: a series of ambient tracks are aborted just as they’re getting into gear, slow-building tributaries that lead nowhere. On ‘Welcome’ and ‘Motion’, crunching percussive loops and sampled water effects are awash with mounting synth lines, but the building pressure has no storm to relieve it, no catharsis and no consummation. ‘Welcome’ rises up into a euphoric synth line, but it’s just teased the ear before it fades quickly away. Most interesting are the vocals, choral or pitch-shifted but always uncanny, which orbit the aural field but refuse to be drawn into sense or centre. Bass synths and skittering drums pile up, and loop crashes against eerie loop; ‘Apart’ is like a Burial off-cut, but heavier and more unearthly.
It is with ‘Now Time’ that the album starts to grow in strength: after all the interesting but slightly soulless ambience of the first four tracks, this sounds almost like an actual song – albeit a remix by a talented madman. Doing clever business with simple elements, this is the first sign on Wander / Wonder that Balam Acab can do structure as well as texture. ‘Oh, Why’ is even better, another almost-song that stands out with a sound like CocoRosie recording for Hyperdub. It even has a verse/chorus thing going on, even if the only distinguishable lyrics are the title.
Thereafter it’s back to looser structures, but ‘Await’ makes more sense than the album’s opening tracks: it’s a fragmentary epilogue to its more conventional predecessors. The album closes with more sampled water, more shifting, uneasy drum loops and bass synths but this time there’s a climax. It all comes together, huge and mighty forms lurching, slowly, in time. Finally, in the last ten seconds of ‘Fragile Hope’, it starts to rain.
The main vexation of Wander / Wonder is the delay of the central, structured tracks, the way they’re prologued by too much ambient aimlessness, intriguing as it may be. The first twenty minutes here are interesting and often engaging, but only occasionally affecting. It’s a mystery why early EP tracks like the enticing ‘See Birds’ have been excluded; a single further example of Balam Acab’s gift for actual songcraft would make this several times the album that it is.
Perhaps, though, the problem isn’t Wander / Wonder itself, but with the mindset with which it’s approached. For the most part this is an album of half-light and half-lucidity, of slow-moving water deep underground: dreampop without the pop. By conscious, critical standards it’s worthy, and grows notably stronger in its second half; but it’s probably unfair for anyone to make a final judgement unless heavily sedated. Maybe the dead ends, shifting thresholds, and loops accumulating like sonic stalactites would all make sense in a semiconscious state. You may as well give it a go.
