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Alka
Principles of Suffocation

Electronic Eel Records

Posted: Tuesday, October 16, 2007
By: Matthew Johnson
Features Editor

With an album title like Principles of Suffocation, you really expect Alka's new offering to be oppressive; the kind of heavy-impact sound that squeezes the life right out of your lungs. If anything, it's the exact opposite. At its hardest, Alka's music takes down-tempo electro and softens its harder edges with warm ambient tones, as on "Furtive." The heaviest tracks here are "Abandon," a more glitch-inspired piece with minor key tones that are brooding without actually being ominous, and "Tesla," which incorporates abstract hip-hop elements within the album's more soothing aesthetic via snippets of manipulated conversation and chopped bits of backwards-looped choral pads. On most of the album, however, the focus is squarely on the drifting patterns of tone and melody, futuristic but soothing. "A Modest Collection of Lint" and "The Clouds Are Quite Wispy" exemplify this approach, both in their titles and their sounds; the former offers hints of jazziness with electric piano tones and mellow breakbeats, while the latter blends deeper tones with wistful ambient ringing. "Decompose" is soothing without being soporific, with shaky snippets of electronic percussion cascading through sustain-drenched piano sounds, while "I Fell Down a Very Long Well" uses to cathedral-sized reverb to evoke the titular shaft's atmosphere while making the descent sound more like a pleasant downward drift than a terrifying plummet. Maybe that's the secret behind Principles of Suffocation; perhaps all the dreamy ambient tones and pleasantly mellow rhythms are all a disguise so that you don't realize you're being asphyxiated until it's too late. In any case, fans of Boards of Canada and Mouse on Mars will be hard-pressed to find a more affable listening experience than Alka offers here.