Balam Acab swept his fingers across a MIDI keyboard and red, green and blue water poured forth from the cascading fountains that flanked him. Behind, a massive, kaleidoscopic projection of autumn leaves cresting placid pond water completed the dream scene. Over the speakers, angels seemed to breathe out the vocals: “Don’t be afraid of you… Don’t be afraid of you….”
In a broad & sweeping sense, there are two kinds of music. I’m referring not to classifications springing from music theory, in which I am not trained at all, but rather to how I find myself automatically partitioning my music library. On the one hand we have music suitable for public presentation, those songs that draw the listeners out of their secluded minds and fragile organic meat sacks and into a communal aural space where listeners exalt in shared emotions and experiences. Think of most pop music, most anything that gets radio traction and whatever you’d choose to play with other people around.
On the other hand, there is the music that pulls the listener deeply inward, shining a ray of soft, diffuse light down into the cavernous internal workings of the listener’s mind. In listening to this music, we ask ourselves the half-understood, linguistically incoherent questions whose answers or pursuit thereof comprise the urgent stream of thought from which all reveries and nightmares bubble forth. It’s like the late-night bull sessions between close friends attempting to unburden themselves of these weighty inexpressables. The friends come away betrayed and unsatisfied when they realize that the torrent cascading from their tongues is slippery, wavy, and never precisely true to their intended meaning. Such bull session devolve into friends talking past each other, unable to convey their truths, settling instead for an infant’s crayon sketch: the outline decipherable but uncertain, the colors and hues comically wrong. Textures might as well not exist.
Alec Koone is fascinated by humanity’s innermost. Formerly of Ithaca College before dropping out to pursue music full-time, the 21-year-old music student adopted the moniker Balam Acab from the so-named Mayan demigod who created clouds by piercing rainbows with his arrows. Balam Acab of the stage works his own magic. He stretches, softens, and mists vocal samples to haunting intimations over the sounds of breeze-rustled trees, quietly bubbling streams, and arrhythmic water droplets as into a cistern.
Judging by his creations, Balam Acab is an experienced psychic caver. The limits of language mean verbal expression of our inner lives can’t help but make a simpering mockery of its irrefutable tugging significance. So, knowing full well that our most authentic thoughts are intrinsically incommunicable – understood in a private manner that makes any physical seclusion a garish public spectacle – we guard our grottos warily. Few are granted access. Yet, for the duration of the set Balam Acab convinced the Jefferson that he genuinely got it. And it seems sincere. After all, his debut EP “Wander/Wonder” is a masterwork in secluded bedroom production. Conventional lyrics, that clichéd communicative crutch, are forsaken in favor of an ensconcing aural experience that speaks to the listener directly.
For fifty minutes, the crowd swayed hypnotically to the organic synths, heartbeat drums, and angelic whisperings. Koone weaved songs together without pause, thematically strung together by the pattering of raindrops or bass like a forest’s pounding footsteps. At the end of his set, Koone abruptly walked off stage with no farewell. It was startling to many in the audience, but, as with midnight bull sessions around the cypher, some things are better left unsaid, unsullied. I blinked furiously as my mind’s eye turned outward once again.
