Sometimes half the battle choosing what to share on this blog is figuring out how to describe music that has trouble defining itself. Berlin’s Achim Gieseler, aka Jakino, of Jakino’s 7th World has no such problem. Achim had a long career making music for films, theater, and television, and an equally varied career backing up others in the German fusion and kraut scene. Everything I could say he pretty much defined in his nom de plume, Jakino’s 7th World. On his debut, Ocean Alpha, we get something that sounds unlike much he did then as it’s his attempt to create a place imagined in his head.
Ocean Alpha draws its inspiration from New Age realms. World music, unlikely sampled vocals and noise, and bite-sized genre trips around the world — all in the spell of 6 minutes, mostly — takes you on a musical journey that is quite aquatic, windswept, and I hate this word: “exotic”. Released in 1987 on pioneering West German electro-acoustic label Erdenklang, Ocean Alpha properly fit into their aesthetic promoting the creation of contemporary music driven by the latest in computer technology.
In the span of a year in West Berlin, beginning the winter of 1986, Achim was joined by the equally mysterious synth artist Clara Mondshine and aided by friend/guitarist Jens Fischer to create all the music you’ll hear here on Ocean Alpha. A furthering of that askew world music fusion Achim had helped others as keyboardist create in groups like Cyklus, Tri Atma, and Eloy, Ocean Alpha (obviously under the influence of Jon Hassell and Eno’s Fourth World experimentation) tried to create music with atmosphere and soundscapes promoting imagined environments from inspired thinking.
The titular track gives you more than a taste of what’s in store. Sampled martial percussion (or resampled real-life percussion) gives way to Berlin-style arpeggios that flow through breathy, synthetic, jungle-like pads, imagining a music untied to any specific genre. It’s as if Cluster went searching for something in the weeds of some Amazonia. Somehow, a track like this builds to include mutating vocals that mimic animalistic chants and oceanographic echoes.
Ocean Alpha bounces around meditative bits that float above faint touch stones of world music. Songs like “Borobudur Bamboo” tips its hat to Eastern folk music but shifts through phases where generative interjections take it out of a set tempo/musical meter. The crystalline production employed by Achim gives Ocean Alpha a character that’s very vaporous and dreamy. It’s obvious the music is “fake” but it moves in a way that’s intriguingly on its own rhythm.
As for me, I actually consider Jakino’s 7th World’s Ocean Alpha a summertime record. I hope you hear the strains of vocal samples in “The Happiest Of All” and trickling, ASMR-friendly “Passing Omo Valley” ends on a certain kind of spectrum. On one hand you have obvious, joyful dalliances that seem vaguely familiar — nostalgia-inducing in a way. Then there’s that other hand. Here instant sonic ethnographic experimentations that try to put you elsewhere far from your world — a wonderful thing to do when you’re in exile at home.
Now, whether Achim wants you to figure out exactly where that where is, is perhaps the point of this sadly forgotten bit of brilliant fourth world music sequenced a long time ago on their bit of now-dated technology. So strange are the mind dances one can conjure through a “Forest of Blossoms”.