A last minute gig came up that no-one else in the band could make it for - so I did it anyway! The Alchemy warm-up Weekender ( 4th June) was a fantastic start to the Summer. Kaplick were running their stage admirably and the Psychedelic Breakfast tent had some great sets going on.
Met lots of friendly familiar faces throughout the day. Two friends I knew who'd be there were David Astrodruid (synths) and Drew Badman (drums) who joined me for a very different but really wild set at the end of the night.
19th June we were all together again for our Solstice party at The Star in Upton. Our first meeting with Alan of Floating Lotus, who did a grand job running the whole show.
MAY 2010
May started off with a marvellous gig at The KuKu Club in Brighton, The Conscious Cabaret All Nighter. A lovely crowd entertained by dancers, singers, jugglers, poets, DJ's and us topping the bill! This was Akahum's first gig as a five piece, so if anyone has got any better pictures than my snaps from the stage we'd love to see them.
Big thanks to Grant (Zak), Lucid & Bella for looking after us and making the whole event happen. It'll be great to see them again in September for OOTO.
The following week we set off to Harefield for The Soundawesome Spring Festival. Lots & lots of friendly faces, a great atmosphere and more bands than you could shake a stick at! We had a really good weekend and a blinding gig on the Saturday night.
Hats off to Jon, Marc, Kirstie, Toombs, Drew, Si and all the the rest of the Merry SA crew.
APRIL 2010
Our old friend, the marvellous Mark Mindflux joins the Akahum crew on synths and percussion.
As well as performing an Akahum set, we will also be doing a special 'NIKIMBO' set featuring Nik Turner on saxophone, space-tastic!
SOLSTICE CELEBRATION PARTY
Saturday 19th June - The Star - Upton upon Severn
We can now confirm details of our Floating Lotus Solstice Celebration Party. The venue will be The Star at Upton upon Severn. We are going to celebrate the Solstice weekend with a bang - 2 bands, live room, chill-out, projections, DJ's and total party vibe in an amazing location for just £5!
MARCH 2010
Studio overhaul and video editing for new projections.
FEBRUARY 2010
Three excellent gigs at the end of February: Swindon, London and Southampon.
Nice warm-up at The Beehive Swindon on the Thursday night, once again a warm friendly Swindon crowd. Wonderful night at inSpiral Camden on Friday with Mark Mindflux. A first for Akahum in London! You can hear the whole gig here. Finally it was off to Southampton with Jay & Thea on percussion for a mad night at The Hobbit. Laser Steve came along and gave us a fantastic lightshow and DJ Leo Hazzard played out the night.
After the gig Terry Hawke from Harborough FM called us and we did a live interview for his show. You can hear the interview here.
JANUARY 2010
Happy New Year! Lots of promotions etc in preparation for the year ahead. Still working on the album.
OCTOBER - DECEMBER 2009
Down time from gigging while we concentrate on tracks for the next album and get down to some long overdue recording.
SEPTEMBER 2009
What a great month for festivals! The first weekend of the month started with the Friday midnight slot at Off The Tracks Festival - great audience with some friendly faces from the Soundawesome crew.
The next day we were up in The Ae Forest for The Eden Festival. What a magical event.
Thanks to Ally, Monk, Adam and the the rest of the Timelord crew for thier excellent Galloway hospitality.
The following weekend we were booked to do a slot at Waveform but they had problems with capacity / council / police etc and dozens of acts got dropped. Good luck next time folks.
The weekend of 18th & 19th had us back up north for the Alchemy Festival.
Lots of friendly faces & up-for-it festi folk. Great sets from Zubzub & Zetan Spore. Thanks to Toby for a marvellous time.
Final top festi of September on the to-do list was Thimbleberry Festival in Co. Durham. We arrived just as Dream Machine were leaving, who had played Friday night. Nice to see Gabs & the rest of the machine again, if only briefly. We started at about 8 so people were up for a dance. Great 90 minute set enjoyed by all.
Subsource took over from us and System7 ended the night. Excellent performances from both. Thanks to Andy and all the Thimbleberry crew for a pukka time.
AUGUST 2009
...started with mud. At Celtic Blue Rock Festival. Nice little festival with a tractor escort departure for some of us. No, not for Manny.
A few days later we took a long drive down to Portugal. Manny was like an ox. Ferry to Dieppe was cool too. £400 diesel bill but hey, we're talking giga-miles.
JULY 2009
Only one mad weekend away in July. Sawyers, Singing Sticks & Livestock Festivals all in two days. Finally found some footage from Singing Sticks:
Livestock was a nice event (last minute booking) not far from Kettering. Highlight of the afternoon was having Chris from UNLIMBO join us on stage for the end of our set. A long time since we'd played together but those synths sounded great!
JUNE 2009
28th - After our set at Sonic rock Solstice, SIX Akahum tracks in Soundawesome's top 10!!
19th, 20th & 21st - Our Pre-Solstice Bash fell victim to a double booking so we rescheduled it to Friday night and moved to a generous friend's place just outside Hereford.
A jolly Summer night with friends and party-people.
Saturday morning we all set off to Builth Wells for the Sonic Rock Solstice. Even though our slot wasn't until Sunday we thought we'd get in early and catch up on the festival vibe etc. Saturday night we managed to meet up with the faces behind Soundawesome, shared a few drinks and had a laugh. Great site, friendly people and majestic Welsh scenery.
We had a great time. The new tracks went down a treat and everyone warmed to the rhythms of Zenga and Charlie, a rare opportunity to see both of Akahum's percussionists on stage together! Thanks to Mart Hasbeen and everyone else who put SRS together.
12th & 13th - On top of other transport problems our gig at Misztifiedmind Records 4th Birthday Party (13.06.09) was thwarted by a section 63 being served on Gaia Roots, who were running the stage. Next time lucky you guys.
Saturday 6th June was our return appearance at the Wyeside Festival, Hereford. Organisers of Wyeside joined forces with 'The Big Event' to pull off a bigger-than-ever free festival. We played a full-on 30 minute set for many happy dancing feet.
Two more gigs on the south coast, Southampton & Portsmouth. Even though the two venues were quite different both gigs had excellent audiences. The Hobbit was our 'Special Spring Quadrantids Meteor Shower Gig', a 2½ hour epic set of new & updated tunes.
'The Cool Banana Junkyard Show' in Portsmouth was a full-on psychedelic experience with our projections & Pete firing off his cool laser show to our 90 minute build-up assault. We must thank Matt & all at TCBJS for a great time had by all.
21 February - SEISMIC RHYTHMS - Cafe Happiness, Manchester Precinct, Manchester, M13 9QS.HYBRID UV & STRANGE DAZE Present SEISMIC RHYTHMS, A multi venue, multi room extravaganza!
JANUARY 2009
Uli, our helpful and supportive friend, has decided to part company with Akahum. We're grateful for the gigs we've shared over the past 18 months or so, and wish him well for the future. Good luck, Uli!
DECEMBER 2008
AKAHUM finished off 2008 with a four date sprint taking in Swindon, Portsmouth, Southampton and Bristol. An energetic end to an exciting year.
Thanks to our new friends Pete & Steve for their fantastic laser show. We look forward to having them around more in the future!
NOVEMBER 2008
AKAHUM album 'ELECTWISTERY' available through CD Baby
Now in the US
Find us on these other sites:
SEPTEMBER 2008
The Festival season is starting to wind down now. We had a last outdoor bash at The Out Of The Ordinary Festival.
Nice event, a bit strange though when everything shut down at 2 am and everyone went to bed! Not a tea tent open anywhere!
JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008
David was invited to play with Shom in May at Biddulph Moor, a cool site overlooking Joddrell Bank Observatory. Great day with Here & Now headlining.
Big Hooray to BadPotNoodle for everything.
June saw AKAHUM play The Wyeside Festival Hereford. Probably the only hot Saturday that summer!
We played an excellent set on the Vishnu Stage to a grateful audience.
August saw AKAHUM play The Off The Tracks Festival. Five years earlier David, Lyndon & Paul supported System 7 at the same event as UNLIMBO, so nice to see some familiar faces again. Also pleased to meet new faces TEMPLE HEDZ and share a campsite with them. Great set guys!
APRIL/MAY 2008
Hear one of our favourite tracks from ELECTWISTERY, Amber Temple, on Jerry Kranitz's ace online radio show, Aural Innovations, from Sunday 10th May, online for a week. http://aural-innovations.com/radio/radio.html
AKAHUM GOES GONG ... We're knocked out that Chris Cambridge and Daevid Allen have chosen our version of Fohat Digs Holes In Space to appear on Gong's soon-to-be-released "tributes" album, Zero's Heroes. You can currently hear the track at www.myspace.com/zerosheroescd, along with Will "Great Minds Think Alike" Greenwood 's version of the same track, and Bubbledubble's and Circle of Friends' inimitable homages to "I Tried So Hard".
This brilliant project is all thanks to the dynamic Chris Cambridge, who's putting the album together under the watchful eye of Daevid Allen. We can't wait to hear all the other free and fanciful renderings of Gong tracks by the weird and wonderful going Gong-like.
MySpace News: The folks at Akahum and Worldvenue Towers are somewhat bewildered by the steady increase in visits and plays on the Akahum MySpace - we're regularly getting 500 plays a day now. Thanks to all you loyal and new friends. Incidentally, we've just notched up our 2000th friend - so congratulations to Sclavonia of Slaskie , Poland , from now on known to us as Sclavonia 2K! Cześc - Witajcie!!
MARCH 2008
Oo-er, MASSIVE MYSPACE TRAFFIC ... We're really excited to be averaging 130 profile views a day - and after uploading tracks from ELECTWISTERY at the beginning of March we peaked a massive 600 listens in one day!! So if you haven't done it already, drop by our Myspace/akahum and make friends. We look forward to seeing you.
FEBRUARY 2008
A lot of energy has been injected into the long overdue update to the website, as well as catching up on writing more tunes for the next tour. Uli has spent some time here in Wales and we've had some great sessions.
APPEAL TO BOOKING AGENTS!!! You can see we're busily booking dates for tours throughout Europe this year and next. This is a really exhausting and time-consuming activity for us so we're hoping to interest booking agents to help us get out there playing live to as many audiences as possible. So if you get a copy of our promo package, get in touch as soon as you can. If you weren't on our mailing list, then give us a call anyway, now that you're here!
JANUARY 2008
We've been busy contacting & negotiating with distributors, trying to get the best deal for our current album, ELECTWISTERY. Once we've made the right deal, we can begin work on our next album.
HYBRID UV & STRANGE DAZE Present SEISMIC RHYTHMS, A multi venue, multi room extravaganza!
