This is the listening experience in which we pleasantly immersed ourselves with the 7-track electro ambient album released in mid-March 2020 by Akkor.
The Turkish artist Üstün Lütfi Yildirim has left us amazed by the exceptional musical talent he brings us with this latest release. With an incredible compositional skill, Akkor proves to be a formidable master of musical magic. It is not only the quality, the organicity and the consistency of the entire production that amazes us, but also the innovation and magnetism with which Akkor has constantly glued us first to our speakers and then to our headphones.
Exciting in the musical arguments bestowed, technically unparalleled in the boundless sequence of subtly sophisticated and ingeniously proposed technicalisms, Akkor’s album takes us through space and time to new environments and horizons, which we realize we have never visited, not even in our most fervent fantasies.
Making us sink into dark atmospheric environments and pushing ourselves with elaborate drones, ‘Durma’ teleports us into a tonal limbo, in which the reverberations of the waves that Akkor manipulates, folds, builds and deconstructs, make us now bounce, now float in states that don’t know the concepts of space and time.
Visceral and materic, and at the same time visionary and imaginative, the involutions, revolutions and evolutions that develop along all 7 tracks of the album are a sequence of sensory deposits that make us enter and exit parallel universes. And depriving us of the ability to control our own body, Akkor guides us in this space-dimensional excursus, maneuvering with disarming skill the waveforms that he shapes like the threads of a puppet.
The title track opens this atmospheric work. Here begins the principle of deconstruction with which Akkor takes away our conventional principles and reference points. The sneaky message, hidden in an immersive intro, is a threatening and overwhelming redefinition of being. Touch after touch, layer after layer, over its 10 minutes, the song inoculates us with the reworking of a new alphabet, new rules, new concepts, which have nothing to do with what we have known to date.
In some ways it is a process of virtualization, which is structurally argued in a similar way in the second track ‘An’. Here, however, the imaginative permeating power is much more stringent and direct. The melodic piano riff with broken repetitions on detached percussions reflects a sense of amazing drama, whose emptiness contrasts only with the silence of a pink noise that closes the narrative interstice created by the intro.
The journey Akkor is taking us on begins to move faster with ‘Zabt’. The rhythmic pulse, the cyclicity of the arpeggios and the modularity of the variations become a vessel on which we unexpectedly get on, sailing towards the next destination which is ‘Rabt’.
The fourth stage of this journey is an organic argument that takes time to evolve. Similar in this sense to the title track, ‘Rabt’ is a sort of transitional interlude where the soundscapes expand and contract thanks to dilated variations of reverbs and synth modulations. It is as if Akkor is warning us that what we will hear next will be something even more incredible, strange and distant from everything we have ever seen or heard to date. He is not yet telling us what awaits us, but still prepares us for a state of total openness.
And the magic comes with ‘Işık’. Here we have the first revelation made and shaped of the new matter manipulated so far. Here the essence of the most ancestral antiquity merges with that of the most futuristic tomorrow, taking the entire narrative of the album to an unimaginable higher level.
Our journey is about to end, and so ‘Yön’ takes us to a decisive slide that will inevitably lead us to the final act of the album. As much as we would like to continue to hover in this non-space, precisely because we are not part of it, with inevitable capitulation we fall downwards, while around we see scroll by that
Of course we took great liberty in giving an imaginary visual response to the long narrative epic that Akkor gives us with this splendid album. But whatever visual reading you want to give to this work, what remains is the communicative and penetrating power of ‘Druma’.
Here we are not faced with the usual stylistic exercise of environmental trance. The suggestions that Akkor transmits with each of the tracks on this album are the result of a careful and elaborate, deeply suggestive creative process, which denotes a long and meticulous work of research and composition.
Innovative and stimulating, with his album ‘Druma’ Akkor gives us the best of his talent, technique and art.
This is one of the most immersive listening experiences in which we have had the pleasure of diving in recent times, that has left us an unforgettable gift and an indelible mark on us.
To find out more about Akkor and his music, check the links below: