Akufen – My Way

I still come back to this album again and again through the years. There is emotion behind the repetition and an unmistakable identity that makes this a fine point in time. I don’t find this dated or old at all. It’s just… unique.

Akufen’s early works, back to his Reno Disco alias, have a rawness and a clear fingerprint that many other artists simply strive for during years or even decades to achieve.

Listening back to this again in 2025, it's more obvious than ever how seismic a shift this sound was at the time. This album came out shortly after the genesis of the glitch house genre, and while you need to go back to Matthew Herbert's earlier albums to hear the true beginnings, Akufen iterated the sound in a significant way. The cuts and glitchery are much more prominent and jerky than Herbert's work. I still find "Deck The House" kinda fun with the dopey, hilarious vocal shouts, shuffled rhythm and the instantly infectious bassline. But good god the rest of it gets old fast. This is an immaculate-sounding album but so style-compact that it does pretty much nothing else except be Glitch House All Capitals. I'll give a shout out to "Skidoos" though, with that lush backing pad, dub tech stabs and more restrained sample glitchery. It steers a little more towards early Swayzak and is quite hypnotic. The rest of the album, however, has aged less than gracefully IMHO.

The electronic audience, always so conservative, turned their backs to this fantastic take of Todd Edwards-isms. Whatever. Leave them with their vanilla synth pads and 4/4 - to me this album being released at the peak of force tracks,mille plateaux and broken beat made me think that music reached the future, but here we are.

in retrospective - a style that dated quite fast, today I find most of the tracks on this album quite annoying

One of the most expertly crafted albums ever, My Way features a wealth of Minimal Techno and stuff almost reminiscent of The Avalanches style Plunderphonics. Tracks like Deck The House and Heaven Can Wait are mind-blowing in how well they are composed jumping from sample to sample.

This album is revolutionary. Deck The House through Late Night Munchies is a truly divine run. If you don't come away from this album with new reflections on sound and sampling, listen to it again.

Does Late Night Munchies sample the beat from Radio by Wishmountain?

I came here because Skidoos, a classic deep minimal cut, was on the Fabric 11 mix by Swayzak, and that's about all I liked unfortunately. Everything else is choppy, annoying sound samples.

There are plenty of artists out there using samples in effective, if predictable, ways, but there are only a handful of artists who I consider sampling innovators. DJ Shadow, Daedelus, and Prefuse 73 spring to mind. Count Akufen in with them. It's not simply a matter of his source (who else samples exclusively from the FM?), or his precision (there are plenty of microsamplers out there) - it's how he puts them together to form a gestalt.

The result is much less fractured than one would imagine. I will go as far as to say that the sliced up samples have flow - real musical flow. Achieving a sense of measure to measure, beat to beat flow is difficult when you take into account the variety of sources, their variance in amplitude, not to mention the zipper noise that is the bane of anyone who works with many tiny samples. When you listen, you almost have to remind yourself that you're hearing many small segments of second-hand music, as opposed to something expressly recorded for this particular album. I don't know how he does it.

Above all, "My Way" is very listenable. His technique may be experimental, but the music enjoyable, danceable, and fun. It's also great for just listening. That's really my criterion for any sort of electronic music with a 4/4 bass drum foundation - is it something I can sit down and listen to with interest? Akufen delivers on this point.

I can partially understand why some are driven to call this music "house." The BPM fits squarely in the house range and it's 4/4 bass drum can give the impression of house music, but that's really just the shell containing Akufen's excellent and unique music. It also serves to stabilize his experimentalism. Often times when artists use innovative production techniques, the music can suffer if the whole thing begins to become more about the technique than the music itself. The palatable "house" container on these tracks help to make the music more inviting to a larger audience.

While I might not recommend it as an essential purchase for casual listeners, those who enjoy innovative and experimental electronic music should check out Akufen.

There's something I really like about this album, but I'm not sure if I love it overall. The cut-up sample aesthetic is far from revolutionary (it first struck me as a housed-up Prefuse73), but Akufen does it in a unique style. The album builds momentum nicely, starting washy and cool then picking up in the middle with some serious bangers, and finally concluding with the more passive title track (I don't count Herbert's remix as the closing track. By the way, am I the only one who finds this "remix" really weak and grating?). Much of the album manages to sound more festive and fun than you'd expect, rather than overtly experimental. As others have mentioned, some of the tracks are backed by very traditional house beats and basslines, which to an extent seems like a bit of a cop-out. You can't get much more of a stereotypical house backing than on "Deck the House." But it sounds really cool, so I can't complain. The mixtures of wildly varying timbres give the tracks a very vivid, colorful feel. I have to wonder how much method there is to the madness of juxtaposition in these tracks, though, and a few employ the kind of meaningless vocal sample I hear in a lot of this more experimental house (like, one incoherent syllable looped hundreds of times). Only Autechre can pull this trick off properly, so it bugs me after a while. But if I'm in the right mood, this record is a lot of fun.