Album review – Ahkmed – distance

I’ve been having a difficult time getting a handle on this expansive and fascinating album by Australian bunch Ahkmed and I’ve finally realised why: distance (they insist upon lower case) is not, as the press release and label would have it, a stoner rock album at all. It is closer in kinship to the swirling and intricate sound of unclassifiable post-rock heroes Godspeed You Black Emperor!, albeit with a slight space rock twist.

By contrast to the seven- or eight-strong line-ups of Godspeed in their hey-day, however, Ahkmed are a compact three-man group of guitar, bass and drums/vocals who produce a mountainous noise that moves like tectonic plates. distance opens with one of the most basic and plodding of all drum beats, which hardly prepares you for the head-spinning delirium of the psychedelic guitar that gradually insinuates itself into the mix, weaving around the pedestrian rhythm with a skill any guitarist would be proud of.

Essentially a single piece of music comprising endless varied movements, the two minutes at the midway point of “Soma” encapsulate the Ahkmed ideology of almost tidal rises and falls in the music. That said, almost any two minute section snatched from the hide of distance would produce much the same result – it’s the patterns and variety that set this album apart.

distance is long, battered, rough and ready ambient doom (a la Jesu, with real drums) bursting into early-Hawkwind-esque wall-of-sound sprays. At various points strewn throughout the hour-long album, there is a grand total of around one and a half minutes of spare vocals topping off the weird moodscapes of backwards sound, over-loaded bass, endless guitar effects and assorted trickery, reverb, echo, drawkcab phasing and lushly imperfect note streams.

Ahkmed’s extraordinary noise sounds as close to deep space musical transmissions being received by radio as it’s possible to get. This is darkest stellar vacuum noise (yeah, I know, it’s a tautology) rather than the open desert soundscapes that Ahkmed’s origins imply… and I love it. distance is highly traditional in instrumentation but radical in tone. Bloody marvellous.