I recently had the great, great pleasure of speaking to Joshua Penman, the mastermind behind Akara, a musical project that blends classical orchestration with modern-day electronic production. With the recent release of Akara’s second full-length album, ‘The World Beyond’, Akara has grown in the size of its fan base, playing sets at Sonic Bloom, Gratifly, Symbiosis, Lightning in a Bottle, Rootwire, and soon, Burning Man. Though still relatively unknown, Akara’s music is at a world-class level and I honestly believe is only shortly away from massive success.
Akara’s music touched me personally in a way different from must music I listen to. Rather than being bombarded with monstrous bass and piercing synths, Penman’s Akara took me on a musical expedition through worlds that seemed both real and foreign. The expansive sound coupled with entrancing vocals was something I honestly had never heard before, yet it sounded so perfect to me. It struck a chord with me deeply and has been constantly playing through my speakers ever since. Upon listening to ‘The World Beyond’, I made it a goal to interview Penman as I could tell there was so much underneath it all that went into this album.
Joshua Penman is a classically-trained composer who has a doctorate in classical composition, sang medieval music, played in Balinese and Sudanese gamelans, studied six languages, went to Burning Man three times, scored four films, and lived in India, learning ragas with a master Indian singer. His résumé is extremely impressive, but doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of who Penman or Akara really is. Luckily I was able to talk with Penman about the new album, his live band, and himself.
When listening to ‘The World Beyond’, I noticed a difference in the atmosphere of the album as opposed to your first album, ‘Extradimensional Ethnography’. Can you explain what was going through your mind with this album in contrast to your previous album?
“Obviously they are from a similar place, but I think that the first album has more of a soupy feel to it all, which was a production choice and a mixing choice. There’s a way that everything blends together, and I’m thinking a lot about India… some fantasy of Arabic and Indian music. There’s this idea that the extradimensional world is very a hazy, soupy, beautiful, soft dream. I think that when we get to ‘The World Beyond’, it all clarifies a lot, and crystallizes. It turns into something more solid, and it’s still otherworldly, you can see it better – the haze is gone. I was definitely thinking a lot about clarity, and I was thinking a lot about the classical tradition.
Something I really like about Akara, that I tried to go for in ‘The World Beyond’, is this idea of what my old teacher Louis Andriessen, writing about Stravinsky, called “The Apollonian Clockwork”. It’s the idea of this music that’s the perfect clockwork of interrelationships and we see the beauty of it because its this collection of tight things that are all contained and in their perfect place. There’s a real elegance in that. I don’t think elegance is a virtue that a lot of producers are going for, but for me it’s something I’m really going for. With the idea of elegance, I started thinking about Baroque music; that was definitely new compared to the first album. A lot of classical music wouldn’t fit in Akara; but theres something in the early Baroque with its simplicity and clarity that I felt I could touch and bring into this. ‘The World Beyond’ is also less chill-out too; it’s heavier, and more danceable. ”
‘The World Beyond’ features a very unique style of blending classical orchestration with electronic production. Could you explain the song production process?
“Some of them started with a core melody, some of them started with an accompaniment figure, some of them were written beginning to end, and some were written with the middle and then trying to figure out how to link the beginning and end to it. For a song like “Resonance,” I began with trying to find the core melody – and when I have that core melody, that jewel, then I can start working around it. I may at that point have some idea of chords or other figures. And slowly, I add production – drums and synths – as well as writing the orchestral parts, using MIDI instruments. Once felt the songs were properly “written” – if not totally produced – I went and recorded the orchestral parts. After that, I brought back the files, edited and produced them, and then finished the production. At some point, we tracked the vocals, mostly but not entirely before the orchestral parts. On ‘The World Beyond’ I actually ended up recording the strings twice because I realized just a string quartet wasn’t enough for this album; I was looking for an orchestral, big sound. So we actually made two recordings of mostly the same material and I layered them. Something really great comes from that layering. They’re in different rooms, and there’s a richness that I got doing that. After we got all that done, I ended up mixing it three times until I was happy, and then finally it was finished. Definitely, in the middle of production with all these things going on I’d ask myself, “Is this ever going to be over?” Each of these songs are about 200 tracks or so. There are very few producers that use more tracks than that – perhaps Shpongle and maybe Ott… ”
With so much work going into the album, was there a specific part that you would label as the ‘hardest’ for you?
“The hardest was certainly the mixing. Taming all those tracks, making them meet each other and figuring out where in the midst of these 200 tracks things were colliding with each other was really hard on me and at that time was beyond my level of production knowledge. As much training in music as I have had, I have no formal training in production or studio techniques. So I actually hired a mixing engineer named Eric Peterson to teach me and help me mix the album. Without that, I would have either released a much lesser quality album or I’d still be mixing it. We worked great and I learned so much. He has a big imprint on the record for sure. ”
With your extensive background in classical concert music, I’m curious as to how exactly you began to get into electronic music and eventually produce it?
“I grew up with only classical music in the house, but by the time I was in high-school, I was listening to some bands and artists; for example, I got into Nine Inch Nails for a little bit in high-school. I went on to keep studying classical music and do it in school, but I went to Holland when I was 19 to study. When I was in Holland, I really got exposed to a whole host of electronic music. I had always been really drawn to the sound, but that was kind of my baptism into the scene. I was going to clubs and psy-trance parties, and I had a friend named Walter who really introduced to the amazing psy-ambient music that was being made in the late 90s. It sounds a little dated today, but they really were trying to make art products; there was a sense that it was something you were supposed to close your eyes and listen to from beginning to end. Stuff like The Mysteries of the Yeti, Mystical Experiences and above all, Shpongle; that stuff made a huge impression on me. It really changed the direction of what I was interested in musically. Also, exposure to the mystical Canadian composer Claude Vivier – there was something about the spiritual purity of his music that I could feel and what was going on sonically, aurally and spacially with psychedelic ambient music really changed the course of what I was interested in.
It look a long time for me to realize I was going to make electronic music. I had dabbled in it, but I was making music for school and was in a structure where I was expected to write concert music and there were venues for me to showcase concert music and that was what I was supposed to do. I thought some day [making electronic music] might happen in the future, but that was out of my mind because this was what I was doing right now. Eventually, I was the only person in grad school going to Burning Man and talking about all this stuff. I was the odd man out, and so I made my way to the West coast. I’m not completely gone from the concert world but I haven’t written a piece of concert music in about four years. I’m over here and I’m a festival musician now. There’s something so amazing about the way people have the potential to pay attention and make music mean something to them in this culture at an outdoor festival; its really a post-modern ritual environment. The music has a really profound potential to be something extremely meaningful to people in an embodied way as opposed to the concert music atmosphere. ”
‘The World Beyond’ is definitely an album filled with a lot of emotion and passion. With having an orchestra play a majority of the music, was there ever moments where you had difficulties expressing your feelings of what the music should sound like to them?
“No – there are difficulties but it’s more of technical question. The music is all written, so if I’ve done my job well, it should all be there and they should play it right completely. I think that a good composer should be able to talk to people at a real granular, detailed musical level and the overall emotion and vibe will take care of itself. In fact, a lot of the musicians whom we recorded never even heard the backing tracks and instead they just heard a click. They had been confused by some of the synths, so I just pulled them out. But the music all works together because I wrote it like that.
So, in terms of expressing how I want the musicians to play, for example, there’s parts that I know I want to be forceful and building up to a big chorus, and I could tell them that, but instead I want to be telling them the technicalities, because that’s really going to give me the product that I want. Now, there were some orchestration mistakes I made and things I wanted to hear but didn’t come out the way I thought it would. But that’s just me as a composer pushing the boundaries of what I know the musicians can do; sometimes it comes out with something really exciting and interesting and other times those boundaries were there for a reason. ”
One of the main features of Akara is your live band. Is that the preferred live version of Akara, and have you considered going a live-band tour?
“We haven’t gotten to do full-band shows so often, but we did it twice this summer at Sonic Bloom and Gratifly. It’s an incredible amount of work for me with coordinating production and getting musicians to the festival. As far as touring with that ensemble, right now we’re not able to book shows that can pay for all that. It’s been a lot of work but it’s also so great to be up there with that energy of music making and to feel that interaction with the crowd; if you hear the music on a DJ set, the vibe and purpose is there. But when playing with a live band, these are all real classical instruments and they all play together…its very different when you see a band actually playing and see their energy. It’s been really great with the live band. I am so stoked to eventually tour with one as well. Hopefully, it’s leading up to being with a touring performance troupe too. There’s one video of us from Sonic Bloom and there’s an aerialist and a stilt walker, and it wasn’t really coordinated through me but they were able to work out this whole story themselves knowing the set. To have something like that but have it be much more refined and particular is what I would like to see. At this point, we’re not really there but I am excited enough to just share the music in whatever way possible. I would love to play as many full band shows as possible and I’m waiting to see when that’ll transpire. ”
Is there a lot of difference between playing live band sets versus DJ sets?
“I only have the two albums worth of songs, so theres not that much leeway I have in terms of song selection. If I have an hour, I have some song selection to do. We did the same set with the live band this summer. With DJ sets it’s cool because I can play whatever I want and change my mind pretty quick, which I like. I think it really depends. I can tailor the DJ set much more to what I perceive the environment to be. I’m going to be playing at least five or maybe six shows at Burning Man and three of them are on Friday. I’m playing one show at midnight at Hookahdome (a big soundcamp on the corner) and I’m going to play a very different set for that than I will for sunrise later that day. I’ll take tracks like “Adoration of the Light”, “Emperor and the Oracle”, and “The Royal Antechamber” – my more uptempo tracks – and leave out things like “Invoking the Unnameable” for a sunrise. It has a softness that takes so long to flow out, and it’s a great way to end a set but isn’t a great fit for midnight. That’s an advantage of the DJ set; the live band just has so many parts that its hard to control everything and it just has to go the way it goes. ”
So is a DJ tour a strong possibility then?
“We come in a lot of varieties; I can play as myself with a DJ set, we can play as a duo (Joshua with vocalist Femke Weidema), and played a lot of shows as a trio with Femke, me, and one violinist or violist. Every time I talk to a promoter, I give them the full range of possibilities. I hope to play a lot of DJ shows in the fall, and I hope to get out of the country and play a lot of shows in Australia and South America during the winter.”
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