If you ventured into an adventurous techno club over the past few years, then chances are that you’ll have come in contact with one of Marc Leclair’s records. Although he records sporadically under his own name – more about that later – and as Horror Inc and Anna Kaufen, the French-Canadian producer is better known as Akufen, releasing on imprints like Trapez, Perlon, Background and Force Inc under this guise.
While Akufen’s work is lumped in with minimal or micro house, he is driven by a different dynamic to his peers, one that centres on using playful samples and dissected, stuttering rhythms.
“On a technical level I prefer to call myself micro sampling than micro house because I feel the importance of recycling sound materials. I dissect sounds from various everyday sources, and fuse those elements into one big organism,” he explains. “The idea of sound collage has been existing for decades among surrealist artists and beat poets. They did it with sound, film, painting and writing.”
In spite of his cerebral approach to production, Akufen was responsible for the biggest record from the growing global minimal scene, 2002’s ‘Deck The House’. Defiantly experimental, it spliced up a montage of samples from local radio stations and a country & western guitar riff with a stop-start minimal bumping groove. Conceived long before mash-up become an in vogue style, it even crossed over to house music’s mainstream DJs.
“I come from an experimental background, but it’s also very important for me to connect the head and the butt and to have people dance to my music too,” he explains. “I believe that if you move your ass, then the rest will follow: Akufen is about connecting both ends.”
The Akufen sound was consolidated on his 2003 debut album, ‘My Way’. For someone whose work centres on trying out unusual ideas, it was unsurprising that he pushed himself to the limits during its recording process.
“I had a month to do it, so I rented a shack in the Canadian countryside where I had no way to communicate, no telephone, no internet, no neighbours and I was one hour’s drive from the nearest village,” Marc recalls. “I wanted to disconnect myself so I had a white canvas to work on. The first two weeks were nerve wracking though, because I had to deal with the space, with the fact that I was alone, by myself all the time, it was like being in psychoanalysis. It was important for me to do this to go deep down inside. When you make an album, it’s like writing a book.”
Apart from remixes, Akufen has released hardly any new material in the past two years, but Leclair put out an album under his own name this year, the evocative techno sound scapes of Musique Pour 3 Femmes Enceintes. The polar opposite of Akufen’s playful, jerky funk, it is also in stark contrast to Leclair’s other album release in the past two years, his mix for London club Fabric.
Having played there live a few times, the club asked him to provide their seventeenth mix, which he was "eternally grateful for" because "the club knew nothing about my DJing skills and they also gave me absolute freedom with regards to the musical selection."
They had good reason not to worry: like every release he is associated with, the selection was immaculate, a highly personal mix that featured tracks from Herbert, Wighnomy Bros, Matthew Dear, Luciano and Thomas Brinkmann. However, after these sideline projects, Leclair is ready to resurrect Akufen.
“Apart from being a good father and a better person, I’m finally working on a new Akufen album,” he laughs. “It’ll surprise people and they won’t expect what I’m going to release but that’s what makes Akufen work, and it’s why I do it.”