Send "Balam Acab " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Absolutepunk |
 I guess I want to apologize to the musicians behind the Drag (or witchouse or rapegaze or whatever!) genre. Because the fact that I’m reviewing an artist like Balam Acab, which is really just college student Alec Koone, means that the whole movement is dead. Gone - obliterated in an explosion of guy-who-wears-corduroy-pants-and-watches-Man Vs. Food. So, sorry?But in the midst of me killing this hip-nasty kid's dreams of always being too hip, maybe there’s some sort of mainstream silver lining. (I guess the real irony here is that I am calling what we do on this silly website mainstream. Did you hear that new Taylor Swift song? Of course you did.) No, the good thing is that even though Mr. Koone is making these sort of aqueous, blissed-out, found sound collages, and doing so in a way that almost any Joe Schmo can enjoy, is quite amazing. It also helps that the See Birds EP is much less, well, terrifyingly creepy than other Drag aficionado outputs like those of Salem or even How To Dress Well (that European dude’s falsetto gets right under my skin!). Yes, Mr. Koone is perhaps making the closest thing Drag will know to commercial or poppy tunes. That’s not to say he’s creating chorus-centric songs or, really, anything we’d call conventional pop music. But he is spending quite a bit of energy pushing songs forward with big bass undertones and high-pitched electronics. Despite his more indie-pop approach, there is still what you could describe as typical Drag atmospheres, or as I’m sure they’re referred to in weird club basements, soundspheriosities. On songs like “Big Boy” and "See Birds (sun)” there are foreseeable destinations; Koone is one of the most successful of his peers when it comes to creating clear emotional routes. Rather than raining synths and beats upon us to see which one gets us wet(!), he pares back his sound and leads us. And for such a young guy, he obviously knows where a wide range of people are wanting to be....full text |
| Pitchfork |
| Your average techno song has between 120 and 150 beats per minute. Faster genres like drum'n'bass can go upwards of 180, and slower stuff like downtempo clocks in around 96 and 112. Tracks on Balam Acab's See Birds EP have a bpm of about 65. Put simply, this is sloooow music. Super-sluggish pacing is one of a few reasons Balam Acab is associated with witch house, the gloom-pop genre pioneered by the band Salem. (Distorted hip-hop, nods to drone and lo-fi, and eerie sonics are other common elements.) Even though he's tied to this scene, there are plenty of things that set Balam apart. Balam Acab is Alec Koone, a 19-year-old college kid studying music education in upstate New York. Unlike some of his peers, he doesn't sing or play instruments on tracks, but builds them instead with samples collected from the Internet. He isolates and distorts bits of source material (say, vocal loops or beat fragments) and smears them together in new arrangements. The results are remarkably seamless. Take opener "See Birds (Moon)", where a scratchy drone meets heavy, blown-out beats and a chorus of layered vocals. The way he puts them together, a new natural rhythm for these sounds emerges and it becomes hard to imagine them in any other order. Sturdy as these songs are, what's really impressive about Koone's music is how he's able to play with contrast and draw out emotion. Tension seems to be the key. On the eastern-tinged "Regret Mistakes", some very light, angelic verses pull the song upward, but when the beat comes in, all gritty and mangled, it yanks you right back to earth. And for digital music, it can be especially evocative. In "Big Boy", which incorporates 80s synths and watery Animal Collective textures, he makes a sampled kids' chorus feel weirdly somber. Next to big, threatening beats, the children sound too young to be at this adult party, and it gives a sense of innocence lost....full text |
| Residentadvisor |
| It wouldn't be fair to mention Ithaca, New York's young Balam Acab without first saying something about goth crunk merchants Salem. Both rely on the same lugubrious slow-mo formula of pitched-down vocals, pitched-up vocals, heavy bass drums and spooky echoes of Three 6 Mafia, Burial, Boards Of Canada and Dead Can Dance. See Birds is Balam Acab's first release, and it's a little less glum than Salem's King Night, but all the more ghostly. Its opener, "See Birds (Moon)," is a dream, skittering over an underproduced bassline and a bizarre vocal phrase that could've been culled from an old Goblin soundtrack. Haunted Tokyo synth-clatter rises and fades somewhere in the middle. We're met with dizzied glossolalia and chopped-up samples of a riverside. (Think Green River Killer in this case, not a babbling brook.) There is a question that comes with See Birds, much like King Night. Is this stuff simply part of electronic music's long catalog of ephemera, soon to go back through the hazy club fog and into post-boom obscurity, much like the explosion of electroclash a few years back? Witch house has relied more on its aesthetic than its instrumentation or method of production—at least until this point. Trip-hop came about similarly, born with a surreal night mood, taking cues from early '90s hip-hop, and we all know where that ended up....full text |
Balam Acab lyrics
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