Ahem - Ahem 2xLP

"Total zoners spanning psych-ambient, drone and lysergic IDM from the Appalachian backwoods, by Jeffry Astin and co’s Ahem, nested on his long-running Housecraft Recordings home to local and global psychonauts. RIYL Otherworld, Buttechno, Astral Social Club, Emeralds. 

The sort of music that gives a contact high, Ahem’s eponymous debut is a treat for those who dabble in psychoactives, or at least like their music to sound like it was made on them. Revolving Jeffrey Astin (Xiphiidae, Digital Natives), his Black Nose bandmate Brian Kinked and Housecraft alum JP Wright chime in on a transportive and surprising session  that arcs from echoes of ’00s psych-folk drone in ‘Angels Whispers (pspsps)’ to proper astral synth roil (‘…and drunk the milk of paradise’) via some outstanding bits of ouroborian drill ’n bass and sweeping synth projections a la Emeralds.

Unfurling with a supernaturally seductive and genuinely psychedelic quality, we’ve not heard an album quite like this in ages. Where the first track documents scene of scrabbling along gravel paths and dry riverbeds set to deliciously washed out pads, ‘cryptids’ feels like a flashback to the early possibilities of vaporware before it went utter shite, and ‘kuwabara kuwabara’ tends to the other side of the trip’s wavelength with a darker invocation of dusky forest spirits with animist synth tekkerz. Sweeter relief comes in ‘project bluebird’, but it’s the 2nd half that really does it for us, scaling from epiphanic synth drone beauty on ‘back in the bush’ to a pulsating, tail-chasing piece of lysergic braindance in ‘one hand washes the other’ and eyes-in-backa-head drone (‘northwoods’) to resolve with heart-in-mouth feels that surely sound ideal on cans in the country or just as well at home with eyes closed."

- Bk