After a big debut in 2010-11 that saw him touring with Mogwai, on Pitchfork’s Top 50 Albums list, and covered by the likes of The New Yorker and NPR, Alec Koone took his Balam Acab moniker and kinda disappeared. I say kinda because he’s still active and in plain sight, if you bother to check Soundcloud, Bandcamp, or social media. He even released a second album, Child Death, in 2015 that could be his best. But Koone has cut himself off from the mainstream by dropping PR tactics from the equation. Child Death signaled some kind of departure from his original home, Tri Angle Records, plus it dropped in mid December, pretty much the Bermuda Triangle of album release timing, when bloggers are far too busy compiling lists to cover much of anything.
Koone has a label of his own now, 32jnqwn, and it’s a gleeful, lo-fi treasure trove of Koone’s weirdo back catologue, from the grindcore speed metal of Deergutsss to the ambient EPs of Life Is. His latest release as Balam Acab is the Watertree Edits EP, a beautiful, four-track shoegaze dreamscape, like hearing Animal Collective’s Feels in slow motion. Check it out below.
slowbreathingcircuit.com 