Send "Balam Acab " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 The rapid emergence of micro-genres has a long history in music, but the Internet has intensified the process. Online communication creates a situation where young artists, separated by geography but brought together through the web, can share the same obsessions and quickly develop remarkably similar aesthetics. The umbrella of music sometimes called witch house is perhaps the most obvious example of this in the last few years, since it combined musical concerns (moody synths, slow tempos, warped vocals, allusions to Southern rap) with a specific visual aesthetic (anonymous producers shielded by hoodies, Christian imagery, deep knowledge of the computer keyboard's symbol keys), and so many artists with these exact qualities appeared simultaneously. Unusually, the bulk of the movement could be traced to precisely one source, Salem, demonstrating how much sway that sometimes reviled outfit had over the minds of budding young producers who spend way too much time online.Once a scene or sound crystalizes, you can bet that the most interesting artists to emerge from it will quickly set off on their own and develop an individual voice. Balam Acab, the project of 20-year-old Pennsylvanian Alec Koone, was rightly slotted with witch house when he released his See Birds EP in 2010. He has the warped voices and the slow tempos, he was on the right label, and his IRL identity had a cultivated air of mystery. But the careful construction of See Birds hinted that his musical ear was a cut above, and now his excellent full-length debut, Wander / Wonder, confirms it. This is a personal and distinctive record with its share of current reference points that nonetheless doesn't need a scene to prop it up. A few things set Balam Acab apart from the pack, first being the overall mood. The post-Salem "dark and creepy" crawl became a cliché in record time, but Wander / Wonder, despite the spectral voices that take the lead on every track, has no hints of nightmares or grim violence. Instead, its primary concern is simple aesthetic beauty, the way a small and specific combination of sounds, carefully arranged but given room to breathe, can have a deep emotional impact. It's pretty, in other words, but its prettiness never feels manipulative or overbearing. It's the sort of music that exists at the intersection between art and design, but it manages to avoid feeling sterile....full text |
| Slantmagazine |
| The blog-born label "witch house" has been thrown around with sloppy abandon and alarming regularity for about a year now, affixed by excitable music journalists to every buzzworthy artist with a halfway decent pitch shifter and a taste for ambient goth. And as is the case for any flavor-of-the-month nomenclature, those who don't necessarily belong in its clutches inevitably get snatched up and clenched into a formless, ill-defined ball of genre ambiguity. To wit, electro upstart Balam Acab (a.k.a. college student Alec Koone), who has no business being associated with the sinister, hip-hop stomp of Salem and oOoOO, and yet is stuck to the witch-house vanguards' shoulders like some helpless static-charged balloon. There's still hope for Balam Acab, however: Though his organic and collage-like See Birds EP failed to draw a substantial distinction between him and the purveyors of gloom trance, his full-length debut, Wander/Wonder, with its Vespertine-esque intimacy and seafoam-flecked flair, is a clear move away from the darkwave dance pack and into musical nonconformity, possibly rescuing Koone from further incohesive clumping by genre-addled journos. Any abiding temptation to throw Wander/Wonder into the witch-house pile stems directly from Koone's reliance on chunky, creeping drum machines, but drowsy percussion is where the similarities end. Balam Acab's sound is more dream than dread, a patchwork of sleepy instrumentation, elfin vocal samples, and sound effects meant to evoke the watery clockwork of a seafloor vista. The fact that Wander/Wonder is a doe-eyed paean to aquatic life is pretty much undisguised, from its stark cover of a shadowy ocean fissure to the bubbling flourishes and splashing crescendos that punctuate the songs' cyclical dreaminess. This isn't so much moody, indie electronica as it is an ideal alternative to the narration of Sigourney Weaver (though perhaps not David Attenborough) on the "Deep Ocean" episode of Planet Earth. For a thematic, innovative display of new-age-electronica hybridism, though, Wander/Wonder succeeds, as Koone blends just enough soul and knob-tinkering to deliver an album that often sounds more like one musical piece rather than eight separate tracks. The album is nothing if not thoughtfully mapped, first beckoning listeners in with slow, funky R&B dressed up in sensual, tidal rhythms ("Apart," "Motion"), then plunging them into the deep with liquid-synth ecstasy ("Now Time," "Oh Why"). Wander/Wonder's progression is satisfying and absorbing without ever exuding cloying self-awareness, and the same goes for its creator: Koone is clever and inventive, but far too engrossed in his vision to break momentum and pat himself on the back....full text |
| Sputnikmusic |
| Listening to Wander/Wonder is an experience akin to having awkward but passionate teenage sex while your parents are watching TV in another part of the house. It’s hushed, muffled by the sound of the movie the two of you just picked for the noise, yet intense, romantic even. This is no fuck; you’re in love here, you believe. It’s understood that the moment’s fleeting, but this understanding is irrelevant. For this half hour, you have bliss. Wait till tomorrow for your pissy little brain to start questioning if any of it was actually real. Alec Koone’s music under the Balam Acab moniker is pretty, which could be the slipperiest compliment I can lob it. Its sweetly spacious, electronic (witch-folk, apparently, how fun!), and also lightly organic, with its vocals alternatively morphing between a chipmunk squeak and a distantly booming baritone. This thing sits adorably yet totally unassumingly. No emotion to it beyond a dreamy bliss. Koone is all naiveté through electronic whispers, recalling the droning Disney ecstasy of Youtube demigod Pogo and broader pop-culture artists Star Slinger and Teen Daze. Wander/Wonder proves that Balam Acab has the chops, so lacking in his contemporaries, to create a cohesive, consistent album, but its ambiguous, being sonically there but too emotionally insulated to leave a lasting impression. The neat trick to Wander/Wonder is that by being vague emotionally, it invites an objective appreciation for what’s beautiful, hence all that water merrily swashing away in the background. Hell yes it’s a gamble; Wander/Wonder is very meditative and fit for a very meditative mood, but without the desire to hunker down and take it all in, it lacks the pacing to bridge the gap between its giants, “Welcome” and “Oh, Why.” The moan in “Welcome” starts Wander/Wonder off at pitch black, beautiful but unsettlingly mesmerizing, yet what follows becomes increasingly bright and consequently slight, frustrating the album's atmosphere. It’s not until the character-drenched “Oh, Why” does the album deliver the emotional opposition to justify its often peculiar shift in tone....full text |
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