Alka

Re: Regarding The Auguries, by Mat Smith

Regarding The Auguries is the fourth album from Philadelphia-based electronic unit Alka. Originally a solo project of Bryan Michael, Regarding The Auguries finds Alka reconfigured as a trio of Bryan, fellow electronic musician Todd Steponick and visual artist Erika Tele, a line-up familiar from their pre-lockdown live sets. 

The album is Alka’s second release on VeryRecords, the label set up by Erasure’s Vince Clarke in 2016. Though largely completed before the world lurched toward its current pandemic-stricken state, Regarding The Auguries taps into the feeling of general unease that anticipated it, its title a reference to the ancient Roman belief that the future could be foretold through the behaviour of birds. 

Bryan, Todd and Erika told Gated Canal Community about the genesis of the eleven tracks on the album, dealing with unintentional odes to early 80s electronic music, Japanese mythology and unsettling earthly phenomena. 

FRACTURED TIME 

Bryan Michael: The progression of this track had a lot to do with Vince Clarke. He wanted more from it. It was originally a very verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure, and I just shouldn’t even get involved with that sort of stuff – I just can’t pull it off! I’m not Vince Clarke. I’m not the pop hit guy. This was one of the times where Todd rescued the track and said, “Let me at it.” And he deconstructed it and I became energised by what Todd did. I don’t want to say we pulled it out of the trash, but I felt like we made it into something completely different. It’s an odd structure, but there’s something to be said for strange song structures. 

Todd Steponick: Vince saw a lot in there. He saw an epic track. He saw something in it and he knew how to push it. 

BM: I think the structure needed to be non-linear. Like, it’s about fractured time, so why would we make it into this kind of very logical structure?

WIDTHCHILD

BM: This track was originally very minimal. It was a very IDM, very raw, very sparse, glitchy kind of track. It was in some sort of weird time signature and all off-beat. It sort of existed within itself, and Todd was able to deconstruct that and make order out of that chaos.

TS: Vince wanted more funk in it, and I did my best. Bryan does a lot of these kind of strange cuts. The way Bryan cuts things, it shifts everything off a quarter note or something, or an eighth of a note and you barely notice it. It all sounds like it makes sense, but when I lay out these tracks on a grid, everything’s way off. I really admire the way Bryan breaks these predictable expectations. What he did at the end of the track just fills my head with these images of wide open architecture and shafts of light coming down. 

FAITO 

Erika Tele: In Japanese, the title is pronounced ‘fai-toh’. It’s basically a Japanese pronunciation of the English word ‘fight’. So you hear it a lot growing up in Japan, especially at school or team events; it’s used as sort of an encouragement, to push someone along if they’re having a difficult time. People yell, “faito, faito!” in a spirit to power through.

TS: That feels sort of timely, right? Now, more than ever, it feels like you have endure and keep going. 

ET: I really wanted to have that positive encouraging spirit in this song, whether it’s for myself or others. Even if things are rough to get through, you just have to push along. I referenced things in my life that spoke to me, in this song. There’s also a lot of Japanese cultural and mythological references in ‘Faito’.

TS: We were looking at the power of myth to aid us in the struggle against everything that’s fighting us. We think that Erika has the answers and she knows where to find them. 

BM: We need her to keep telling us to ‘faito’. 

EARTH CRISIS 

BM: I was intrigued by these sky sounds that were being recorded throughout the world and put on YouTube. They were just so dark and mysterious and it’s like, where did these come from? What is this sound? Some of them are probably hoaxes, but I started looking for answers in the mystery of what these sky sounds were, and a lot of it was earth distress, geophysical anomalies – everything from that to the angelic harkening of the end of the world. 

I discovered that there was this fellow named William R. Corliss that researched a lot of these anomalies in science. He scoured nature journals and science journals to discover things that weren’t quite answered or understood at the time, but that still made it into these scientific journals. So he pieced all these factual information findings together into a series of books, and so on the sleeve we cited the APA citation for his book, Earthquakes, Tides, Unidentified Sounds And Related Phenomena. A lot of these sounds are hoaxes, but then one of our friends in the UK posted a video of himself mildly freaking out to the sky, which is literally groaning. Here was a first-hand account of someone experiencing these sounds, so we asked his permission to use his recording in the track. 

TS: This was entirely Bryan's work. Whatever the pretext, he has a way of turning doom into sound: it’s this heavy, humid dread that never lifts, like on a summer night when you know a thunderstorm’s needed. When is the release coming? With ‘Earth Crisis’, it never comes. And there’s some damn good synth sounds in there Bryan, I might add. 

BM: People just started hearing these sounds, and they started recording them with their cellphones. Was it just a 2012 sort of end of the world phenomenon? Well, that probably played into a lot of it, but going back, I was able to find that, actually, these sounds have been heard throughout history by indigenous people, and by scientists, and that’s why the APA citation came in. That’s kind of the validation for it. The song is basically about the mystery. It’s about the quest to understand mystery and how exciting that can be. I love how Erika, later on in the album, says “Stepping into the mystery.” That just sort of describes it, and describes that feeling. 

SCRAPPLE 

ET: This was a really fun song to do. I enjoyed being able to shout on this track.

BM: We love juxtaposition. The recording of ‘Scrapple’ was amazing, and it was all Erika. Whereas ‘Faito’ was a call for support and encouragement, ‘Scrapple’ was almost like a call to arms.

ET: Around the time we wrote this, you had all the protests and riots going on in France – the yellow jackets, the gilets jaunes – and there was a bit of that steam coming off, and some of that aggression that was building up. 

BM: This is another track that was supported by Vince’s producer mind. Originally it was pretty much an instrumental, and he was like, “Let’s try some vocals.” It inspired us to go further with it, and that wound up as us basically shouting at Erika to shout into a microphone in my garage! 

ET: ‘Scrapple’ also resonated energy from the track ‘Los Niños Del Parque’ by Liaisons Dangereuses. Vince and Reed Hays had played this on their radio show about a week before we did the vocal for this, and I think I was channelling that song here. 

SOURCERY 

BM: We uses a sample of Boris Karloff on this track. I love his voice and I love horror movie samples, so that happened to work its way in there. And then you have Erika’s amazing lyrics – “multiple, singular, modular, linear”. I love that. It’s kind of subtle. It’s a well-needed break in-between encouraging people and fighting them, and rioting, and the collapse of the earth system. 

The lyrics “multiple, singular, modular, linear” were meant for another track, but they just worked their way into this song too. I was working on both tracks at the same time, and they branched off and formed into two different things. 

Alka - Todd Steponick, Erika Tele, Bryan Michael. Photo (c) Erika Tele

MY HEART 

ET: I had to make myself very vulnerable for this one. I had to step out a little bit and just go for it. I wanted to capture that fragility. The instrumental was so dreamy and lovely and I wanted to complement that with the words and with the melody. I wanted it to be a really tender song. 

BM: You succeeded. There’s a little burst of radio at the beginning. That was just random chance. I was into sampling radio frequencies – flipping through the stations and seeing what comes up, and that’s where the vocal burst of “my heart” came from. It sort of inspired the whole song. It was just a lovely chance sort of thing. 

TS: There were so many versions of this track – how far back does this go Bryan? 

BM: It goes right back before my first album. It was a song called ‘A Dog Loose In The Woods’, which never made it to my first album, and it never made it to my second album which was called A Dog Lost In The Woods. It’s just the idea of a song never being completely done. I just kept revisiting it, because I always thought there was something there in the melancholy melodies. I put a radio on, “my heart” came out and Erika went with that theme. 

TS: There’s a whole trail of beautiful experiences with the different versions of this song. I really love all of them, and they’re all really lovely tunes. Some of them were brighter than others. Some of them were faster. But this one – it just has this feeling of a beautiful truth and that vulnerability that Erika spoke about. There’s also something intimate, something uncomfortable, but not bad. Bryan gets that out of the music and Erika just completes it with her vocals. 

BM: Todd is not only my co-collaborator, but he’s also my archivist. He keeps me organised. I’ll have any number of tracks that I’ll forget about or throw out, and Todd will rescue something one day, out of the blue, and say, “Hey, do you remember you did this?” That’s where ‘Faito’ came from too. ‘Faito’ was just a sort of drum loop that I’d recorded, thought, “Hey this is great!” and never got around doing anything more with. Then one day Todd shows up to band practice with this fully fleshed-out amazing track that we just took where it is now. This is how Alka works: we play off each other to create a song that could never exist without the three of us. 

SOLFÈGE 

BM: This is all about the lyrics, and again it’s that idea of stepping into the mystery. We’ve all heard that ‘do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do' rhyme growing up, and that’s an example of a solfège. When I was growing up, I was just like, “That’s an octave – they’re just singing the notes, and there are words for the notes of an octave.” For this track, I started to delve deeper, and I discovered this has some pretty interesting occult connections. 

TS: We hadn’t noticed it at all, but Vince felt that this had a sort of gospel sound to this, so we kind of went in that direction with organ sounds and clapping. We recorded the handclaps in Bryan’s garage. There’s also a tiny soul music sample in there attached to a breakbeat which seemed to play into the vibe that Vince heard. 

BM: It’s just about juxtapositions that we play on. That means you can have a song about the darker meanings behind something you hear everyday, yet throw in soul music samples. It works. I was also going after this feeling of the unknown, and what that would sound like in a song. 

TS: I think we generally have like a deep appreciation of big unknown lands, like the lands beyond the horizon. Somewhere that’s not south New Jersey, basically.  

Alka - Todd Steponick, Erika Tele, Bryan Michael. Photo (c) Erika Tele

DOUBT 

BM: I was always drawn to this track. I felt like it was very like the Berlin school of ambient electronic stuff. This came out of a discarded loop from a track and Todd just took it places. 

TS: I took one of his tracks and slowed it down, got a loop out of it, and that became the foundation. We fell in love with this one idea, and from there it just went on. I ended up loading it with vocal samples, drawing from philosophy and other areas, gave it all to Bryan and he rightfully got rid of pretty much most of it. All for the better. Some of the core bits were about doubt, and I guess I’ve just been thinking about that a lot. When you look at the cultural landscape there’s a lot of people just accepting the most erroneous of ideas. There’s no critical thought process, and we can see how dangerous that is. Doubt starts the process of cutting through it; to hopefully arrive at something of integrity, some closer idea of truth.  

BM: On this album, we credited ourselves not just with the synth and the vocals, but with ‘worry’, ‘fear’ and ‘doubt’. I just feel it makes sense. This track is very unsure. 

TS: There’s a theme of disillusionment that runs through the album, from ‘Fractured Time’ onwards, and I think I was playing off of that. 

BM: Somehow this became a very timely record. Even though it’s been delayed for so long because of things, it does feel very timely in its themes.

TS: Erika had done the lyrics for something else, and I found them and thought, “No, this works.” Doubt is often personified as a demon, so I just thought this belonged – it was playing off of other things, in my mind, and some of it ended up on the track.

ET: I think sometimes it’s the state we’re in when we work together, where we’re just reflecting what’s going on in the world. We meet up, we see how we’re all feeling, and that informs what comes out. At times we have this synergy that we try to encourage in each other, but really the demon of the creative process is when you start doubting yourself. Each time we meet up to rehearse, we bring whatever’s going on in our lives. But somehow every time we met up in Bryan’s garage, everything would be just fine. Like our energies would lock in and our worries evaporate through the music (at least for me!).  Like with ‘Scrapple’ – I had work stuff going on and that just kind of built together into this energy which we brought into the music. You can’t help it.  

BM: We wanted to make an electronic album made by humans. It’s always been one of the classic critiques of electronic music: “Oh, it’s just robotic.” It’s just people pushing buttons. But that’s the thing – it’s still humans making it. 

DEAD LIKE ME 

BM: I didn’t realise it at the time, but the title ‘Dead Like Me’ feels like a reference to connecting with two other individuals - Erika and Todd - that understand me for who I am. I didn’t want to paint them as dead, so it was also a comical reference, which I only picked up shortly afterwards. It’s about connecting with people and then Erika took it further with the concept. I thought that people would think that the main synth line came from Vince, but I created that synth line! Somehow, I managed to subconsciously sound like Vince Clarke, which is funny. 

ET: Well, I have to say, there was a bit of an ode to Vince Clarke in the vocal. 

BM: Oh wow, okay, so it’s all coming out now! This is the Vince Clarke tribute track – 

TS: – he worked on! 

BM: Wow. That’s just weird.

ET: I think I felt a lot of past memories in this song. I thought the bassline felt very nostalgic, and reminded me of that era of music, so I wanted to reflect that in the vocal. 

KING CARD 

BM: Elizabeth Joan Kelly contributed to this track. So here’s where I just really enjoy connections through just strange experiences: Elizabeth Joan Kelly is a fellow librarian who lives in New Orleans, but who also happens to be a pretty amazing electronic musician in her own right. She released an album recently called Music For The DMV. 

This track only got finished in lockdown. I was never quite happy with the sound, but during lockdown I made it sound even more sort of claustrophobic, which reflected how we were feeling at the time. ‘King Card’ is a reference to the tarot, and the idea of prophesying future events. In many ways, the album title Regarding The Auguries really does make sense for this album. We played with that title for a while, and we weren’t really sure if it made sense, but it really does when you think about everything that’s going on in the world right now. 

Regarding The Auguries by Alka was released October 9 2020 by VeryRecords