The End of the Beginning is an ambient journey forged from low rumblings punctuated by minimalist incidental sounds. It is difficult not to think of this album as an audio Rorschach test. The opening track makes me think of a meteor hurtling through the cosmos. Is that the sound of a helicopter, this the sound of a snowplow scraping the pavement? (That one bit is definitely a woman speaking French – of that I am sure.) The use of sounds that suggest commonplace noises warped out of context is this record’s greatest strength; the tension between familiarity/incongruence adds an atmosphere of the unheimlich to what would otherwise be a standard dark ambient outing. Akala proves that there is something weird going on in Lithuania.

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