Klinik - Akhet
Marc Verhaeghen's Klinik returns after 2002's electro-stomper, Sonic Surgery, with the double disc Akhet, a dark and spacious ambient journey through the liminality of dawn. The first disc begins with "Heka," the Egyptian word for magic and unfolds like an early wind blowing in from the desert, carrying on its light breath the yellow sands which have covered civilizations for centuries. Verhaeghen is experimenting in the long form with this record, exploring a moment of time through spatial arrangements of manipulated melodies, long tones, and ambient drones. Nothing changes quickly in the 30 minutes of "Heka," but there is the continued pressure that something might.
The distinction in "dark" ambient music is the lack of light, the continued presence of something hidden in the music. You often feel claustrophobic, cut off from wind and light. The music has weight. Verhaeghen doesn't delve into that bleak of a darkness with Akhet. He hovers on the edge of morning; "Akhet" means morning and the music waits at that event horizon, that balance point between light and dark, life and death. In the old days, this was the final instant of exile, that final moment before the world was born anew with the rising of the sun, and there is a sense of anticipation in the air. The particulate -- the sounds and the rhythms -- are vibrating with an urgency of release. Which is why the thirty minutes of "Heka" and the 60 minutes of "Orion" (which makes up the entirety of disc two) never seem overlong and tedious. Something is always about to happen, and this sensation pulses throughout Verhaeghen's drones and rhythms.
The second track of the first disc, "Bellatrix," hums with rhythm, gentle ethno-tribal surges which remind me of the work done by VidnaObmana and Steve Roach. There is the sound of water later, the red gurgling of the Nile as it quickens in the early spring. That flash of light -- dawn -- can't be far off now. Energies quicken with "Mintaka" as rhythms grow stronger and closer, pulses of light running through the near dawn. There is a bass rhythm running beneath the drum pads of "Saiph" as all things come to a head. In the end, the sound doesn't explode, it simply changes. Dawn happens, a beam of red and orange light pierces the sky; your breath may quicken in your chest, but there are no explosions, no fireworks.
Akhet may be more familiar to those who follow the FAX label and Peter Namlook's style of environmental ambient music. Opponents of this style will say that nothing happens in the music, but actually what the music challenges you to do is to be "in the moment." There are changes -- you can't take a breath in exactly the same way every time -- there are miniscule variations in what is unfolding around you. Akhet waits for dawn, and Verhaeghen stretches out that last minute before sunrise out towards infinity. This is not a style which Hands is known for, but it is good to see that they are expanding their sonic palette. Akhet fits in those quiet moments between events when you are done with What Was and are waiting for What Will Be. What Is is you suspended in space, listening to the winds of Akhet.
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