AKUFEN

My Way

CD/3LP, Force Inc.

RRAW says this one is “the record of the year” and he might be right. He is usually right in all matters of electronic music and always right on the most progressive forefront of unusual music. And “Microsampling” – as Akufen calls his style – might be a hint in a new direction. This is more than tiny bits of radio-samples spliced together; it is the handicraft of arranging these tiny bits into superbly arranged pieces of funky disco-music that makes “My Way” so outstanding. As long as you keep your ears open to the small things, you won’t grow bored on Akufen.

Akufen has put a little essay on “microsampling” onto the innersleeve of his record, which is unusual since most electronic artists rather try to mystify and obscure their origins, ideas and politics. Yeah, politics. With all the talk about copyrights, infringements, piracy and the downfall of the music industry, sampling has surely become a political issue as well. Akufen is out of danger though, because the way he samples, in ever so tiny bits and pieces, makes a lawsuit impossible. Who will be able to prove the origin of these bits, if even Akufen himself doesn’t know about them anymore. From an artistic point of view these origins are not important anyway. From an artistic point of view all these top 40 artists should sue each other for copyrights, because they all copy each other. Originality has become a taboo in modern charts-music. Which, in my meagre opinion, is the reason for the downfall of the music industry much more than all the mp3 loaded down from the internet in all the world.

But anyway, I’d like to sample some parts of Akufen’s essay right here and now in his own style: “ev wake surf airwaves radio 5 sec rad airwa music has sound and med ves right to ex media exist dying waves ideology 5 sec waves right to media exist nobody creating like roots”. Get it? Well, you can read the whole thing on www.force-inc.com anyway. The last sentence is the most important anyway: “It’s time to take some risks & break some rules” and it has been a long time since I heard an electronic music artist say that essential statement in such bold words. I mean, this notion has been the source and reason to live for all art ever since the turn of the last century. That has been the driving force of Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Jim Morrisson, Günther Brus and whoever else you can think of as a serious artist. For someone like Akufen it is not easy to survive. Even though he puts hard-assed and very dry funk-patterns underneath his samples, there is not a big chance he will get rich and famous on that. (In techno as in any other genre you’ll only get rich and famous if you put together all the most common denominators and then draw them over the top so that everybody will snap his fingers to your beat… but what happens to you artistic integrity you’ll have to count up for yourself.) That’s why the title of this album, “My way” is not at all pretentious but more of a thank you to the past and a promise to the future.

There is one more important point that Akufen hints at: the difference between what you perceive in different moment and with different depths of scrutiny. Do you remember looking through microscopes in school? You’ll always be able to see very different things with different microscopes. For instance, looking at your arm you might see pores and hairs with a light microscope, with a stronger one you might be able to go deeply into the tissue of your skin, and with electronic microscopes you can go down into the single cells and look at their structure and with some microscopes you might even be able to get the structure of single molecules and even deeper. An analogue paradigm is true for Akufen’s music. If you listen to it without any concentration, only as background music, you’ll get some nice funky tracks with a good groove. On listening closer you’ll start to hear all the different parts and bits he has used. On listening even closer and maybe over and over again, you’ll realise how carefully these bits have been put together, and you’ll get down to more and more bits that you hadn’t noticed before. You’ll start to separate all the tiny bits and then put them together again in your mind. Believe me, you’ll learn a lot about music from Akufen. Or just shake your ass to it.

08/2002