Ak’Chamel and the Stolen Gnosis
Ak’Chamel and the Stolen Gnosis
This is not so much a review, as a warning.
Most of what we call psychedelic music invites, if not demands, some enhancement to really get into it; but a rarer, wilder, variety is itself potently psychogenic, and to listen under the influence is to flirt with catastrophe. With Texan snake-charmers Ak’Chamel currently running amok across America, this latter type of music may have achieved its final form.
To see a show like this in an ordinary club would be a total non-sequitur, like witnessing a Haitian vodun ritual in your grocer’s frozen food aisle. We had to trek to the ragged edge of San Diego, alongside the embattled Mexican border, to see a band that presages the collapse of all order, the heat death of the universe.
The ruined bathhouse at Jacumba Hot Springs––a roofless, skeletal husk in a high-desert backwater revived as a bohemian enclave, was a perfect setting. At a show like this, you look sidewise at the other attendees, wondering who else would come to something like this on purpose.
NT Fan, an unassuming alias for Trey Spruance, was a perfect tenderizer for what’s to come. A whirling dervish whose frenetic oud-surf exotica with Secret Chiefs 3 is an illuminated ancestor of Ak’Chamel’s similarly Arabized oeuvre, Spruance abused a loop station to emit chaotic shards of math-rock shrapnel that fittingly heralded the enigmatic headliner.
Out of the midst of the crowd, Ak’Chamel, Giver of Illness, strode into the suddenly claustrophobic space, ringing bells and croaking curses as harbingers of an apocalypse of furious inertia and ecstatic torpor. Resolutely inscrutable, they decline to be interviewed by the press and never address or respond to the crowd, so one must look to their song titles for clues, only to find esoteric claptrap and caustic koans that further inflame the mystery (“The Cosmic Vulva Versus The Post-Enlightened Tongue,” “Clean Coal Is A Porous Condom,” “My Ouija Board Spelled S-C-A-M”). Their masks and vestments reduce them to crude effigies animated by a spiteful demiurge to play detuned dirges for a moribund world.
Anthony Trevino
The compact stage confined the trio like displays in a future museum, but the vocalist periodically leapt into the crowd, a high priest accosting backsliders at a revival. His distorted, barbarous glossolalia rasped and gnashed over droning rebabs, spastic ouds and skirling mizmars to conjure a suffocating miasma of heat, smoke, and sand. Like Heilung or San Diego’s own bygone cult act Crash Worship, they subvert traditional instruments and hypnotic techniques to evoke the savage rituals of prehistory, while prophesying an even more primitive future.
I had no idea how soon that future would become my own.
At hundreds of shows in various states of intoxication, I’ve withstood all kinds of insanity with a few exceptions––fainting during an overpowering Einstuerzende Neubauten performance, getting stomped unconscious in a Butthole Surfers pit, and retreating from a Sunn O))) show when I realized that the fogbound audience was about to merge into a lumbering behemoth and rampage across Salt Lake City to climb the Mormon Temple. I thought myself a hardened psychonaut, fortified against any musical assault. I was foolish. Under a judicious gloss of marijuana, alcohol, and a whisper of psilocybin, I was a leaf on the wind when the show dished out a nameless medicine so potent that it blew me out of my own head.
According to my friends, I was clinging to an amplifier near the stage for several songs, then vanished. I recall feeling I was trapped in the Illness, exiled to Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique, when everything went black.
Near the end of the show, I was discovered in the back, conversing intensely with someone who wasn’t there. When my fellow pilgrims rescued me, I confessed to having lost my mind and my phone. We searched the venue and found the phone and an LP copy of Spiritually Unemployed that I’d purchased, at the deserted dead end of a shadowy corridor. My mind remained at large a while longer.
Anthony Trevino
Lucidity returned as suddenly as it left, and I found myself talking with a bemused Trey Spruance about my failed gambit to get SC3 to play Les Baxter’s Dunwich Horror soundtrack at a film festival ten years back. We left soon after, wondering if I was the show’s only victim of spiritual trepanation.
Most likely, it was just the glitching of my aging brain and shrinking tolerance, but I am haunted by the sense that I’d dissociated to erase some overwhelming gnosis that my fragile ego just couldn’t handle.
To those unfazed by a deeply confrontational trip, no enhancement required, I wholeheartedly recommend a visitation with Ak’Chamel, but these faceless revelators are also tricksters. Their promise of transcendent illness masks a sinister proviso, that the exalted experience may be repossessed at any time, for your own protection.
Anthony Trevino
Ak’Chamel Remaining Tour Dates
- Jun 26: Vancouver, BC at WISE Hall
Jun 26: Bellingham, WA at Lookout Arts Quarry
- Jun 28: Boise, ID at Neurolux
- Jun 29: Salt Lake City, UT at Urban Lounge
- Jun 30: Denver, CO at Hi-Dive
- Jul 2: Denton, TX at Rubber Gloves
Europe (Fall):
- Sep 4: London, UK at IKLECTIK
- Sep 7: Manchester, UK at Soup
- Sep 8: Edinburgh, UK at Bannerman’s
- Sep 9: Birkenhead, UK at Future Yard
- Sep 12: Leffinge, Belgium at De Zwerver
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