Akufen — My way. A brief story behind the album maden from airwave samples

Akufen: “Every morning when I wake up, it’s become customary for me to surf th airwaves on both my tuners and shortwave receivers. All that we hear on the air is dead within a few seconds. It’s gone. It’s in between stations, the ads, the interference. I attempt to give new life to dead airwaves on the very moment of their short existence. Every form of music has a right to exist—and be microsampled. I try to give a new life to sound and gift it with immortality. A fraction of a vocal, of a pad, a glitch or interference integrated with an ad or a song—everything is recyclable.”

Marc Leclair’s (Akufen) debut album was created in complete isolation. No phones, no mail, no angry exchanges with a neighbour. Only a home studio with a lake view near Quebec, Canada. The only human contact was through the window when a local fisherman drove by on a Skidoo snowmobile. “There were snowstorms every day, and this big window in front of me was just like a white wall, a blank page, so it was perfect. I wanted to make a really personal album, for this music to come straight from my guts.” Leclair’s comparing himself to a butcher: “I dissect the sounds and grab what I need.” Apparently, that’s why one of the releases of My way came out with a photo at the slaughterhouse.

Akufen didn’t bring anything new—microsampling had existed before. Mark Kinchen and Todd Edwards had been doing this since the early 1990s, only they used a cappella and fragments from records in their tracks, while Marc Leclair drew material for himself straight from the radio. “Sampling has become almost a threat to artists and the record industry. Endless court settlements and legislation debate who has broken the limits... 5 seconds, 10 seconds, what’s the point. The perspectives I intend are based on giving new life to that fraction of a second from tracks that maybe didn’t have any success or the familiar voice of a radio show host. I’m not reinventing anything. I’m just tired of going into a record store and not finding that appeals to me. People need to be stimulated and surprised all the time, but the first person you’ve got to surprise is yourself.”