Monchhichi

Sophomore album by Akane, the bedroom-pop solo project of Tenerife’s Carolina Machado - best known as the drummer and vocalist for space-rock psych outfit Gaf y La Estrella de la Muerte.

Born out of an intensive three-day artistic residency at Keroxen festival, Carolina returns to Espacio Cultural El Tanque - the massive, echoing decommissioned fuel tank that gave her debut release its raw, subterranean resonance. This time around, she joins forces with Cairo-based producer 3phaz, pairing her ethereal, floaty textures with his heavyweight rhythmic architecture and sharp-edged electronic grooves.

Picking up where Night-Time Birds left off, Monchhichi expands Akane’s sonic palette into darker, more immersive territory. The record navigates a vivid dichotomy between the neon-lit, spectral urban pulse of Japan at night, captured in tracks like “Tokyo City Girl” and “Monchhichi”, and the mist-choked coastlines of Tenerife, evoked in “Takatana” parts I and II. With the murmur of a constant sea swell, the album serves as an inner sanctuary—a place for reflection on her own creative mechanics, artistic isolation, and the transformative weight of motherhood.

Drenching dreamy shoegaze guitars and vintage synth lines in 3phaz’s hypnotic, club-born polyrhythms, Monchhichi bridges leftfield dance music, ambient pop, and raw location recordings. An(other) essential document of Canary Islands sound worlds, pushing the archipelago’s experimental underground further into its own thing.