Arkhonia: "DDRhodes"

Already tagged by Boomkat as a “commercial for the Norwegian Postal Service,” the debut album from Arkhonia is the drone nostalgia trip of the summer. It’s even more of a trip when you consider its author is so elusive, he won’t even take the credit for it: no one actually knows who Arkhonia is, only that he was once 50% of the catchily-named self-releasers www.jz-arkh.co.uk. Remember them? No, probably not, but fans of the Pet Shop Boys might. Tennant and Lowe snagged the duo five years ago for their Back to Mine compilation, letting the experimental sunrises of “DD Rhodes” sit at the table between the Philharmonic Orchestra and Video Kid. It was, quite possibly, one of the Pet Shop Boys’ more bizarre arrangements to date. Odder even than the b-side of Yes (2009). Odder even than this.

Having done a runner from the Pet Shop dinner party and 403’d his old web address, 50% of www.jz-arkh.co.uk is back, now with added vowels and clarity. Arkhonia’s Trails/Traces is a slow but delicious pearl of sound—the plane vapour cover art suits the music down to a T—and it’s here where “DD Rhodes” has been revisited/expanded, and rolled into one single word. For twelve minutes, intermittent glyphs wash over you, as gentle and as luminous as the Orb used to be back when they thought they’d been abducted. These glyphs, a future dub house staple in the making, then get bonded with dots of light to create a calm but eerie aura, and one you won’t want to climb out of, like bathwater. Arkhonia is swinging a pocket watch here, waiting for your eyelids to sag. When he’s checked that they have he mixes fishing boat noises to push the cut-off factor to maximum, and lowers you deep into a narcoleptic hole. It’s only by tailing off with some springy piano chords that you realize this is still music, and not, as I first thought, the ambient equivalent of Crocodile Dundee when he hypnotized a bullock. I’d love to have been at the Pet Shop soirée the night this one came on the stereo; Dusty Springfield must have gone falling headfirst into her Florette Sea and Earth salad.