I’m so glad to announce that, after being in the works since very long, Amon‘s “Akh” was released today by Nashazphone.
It was late December 2017 when Hicham Chadly got in touch and kindly proposed me a vinyl release on his exceptional label. We started to discuss the project and I thought that the best choice would be to reunite all the tracks I had spontaneously recorded back in 1995, which were split between the untitled “Amon” CD and the “El Khela” CD, respectively published by Murder Release and Eibon Records.
When reasoning about the title for this release, Hicham came up with the “Akh” concept which is explained here below:
“In Ancient Egypt, Akh was most often used to mean a complete person, whether living or dead. While living, the Akh was composed of all five elements – The Body, Ba (The Personality: Humor, Warmth, Charm), Ka (The Life Force unique to every person) which stayed, The Name, and The Shadow. When dead, the Akh referred to the reunion of the Ba and the Ka, which they also believed happened each night. In death and every night too, Akh is the reunion of the self.”
As a metaphor, I really couldn’t think of anything that would better hint at the reunion of these tracks which were separated for no particular reason other than the pressing of a double CD was out of the available budget…
Here’s some words I put together recently to describe the album:
«I recorded all the music featured on “Akh” at home in just ten days during September 1995. I was 25 then and I must admit I don’t remember much about those days, except that I used to spend most of my evenings watching movies and reading books. A lot of them. And making music, of course. Social life didn’t mean much to me at the time. I was in a period of transition in which I had decided to change my acquaintances, I had been working for a few years and I was starting to build my own music studio.
The only proper instrument I used on these tracks is a Roland JD-800 synthesizer, sequenced with Cubase and mostly recorded on an ADAT machine along with a few samples courtesy of a primitive sampling application which I used to run on a 386 Personal Computer. Since I still didn’t own a DAT machine back in the days, the tracks were mastered to DAT tape for release with the help of a friend of mine.
The following chart shows the chronology of the recordings of these very first “Amon sessions“:
Regula #1 – 05.09.1995
Uhura Photons – 07.09.1995
Time Is Waiting – 08.09.1995
Mopula – 10.09.1995
Tanit Zerga – 12.09.1995
Darkside Return – 13.09.1995
She Touched the Stone – 14.09.1995
Hiram Roi – 14.09.1995
Wasted – 15.09.1995
Six of these nine tracks were chosen for the “Amon” CD, while the other three, namely “Darkside Return“, “She Touched the Stone” and “Wasted“, were later used on the second Amon CD entitled “El Khela” in 1997. Of course they were not ‘second choice’, it was just a matter of creating the right flow as the label could not afford the release of a double CD.
All the pieces were created in a very spontaneous way. I didn’t have exactly this type of sound on my mind when I began recording, and I didn’t take inspiration from other similar experimental / deep ambient artists simply because I was mostly unaware of any of them in those days. This just happened. I discovered that my machine – the JD-800, which I’m still fond of after all these years – could create these beautiful and profound layers of sound and I simply explored them for the first time.
During the following years I tried to expand and improve this type of sounds/drones and the general concept of the Amon project, also using different techniques and instruments, but when I recorded these original nine tracks I was somewhat a ‘virgin’. For me it was like some sort of a sudden miracle/magic happening for the very first time.»