Blog 02 – August 31, 2026
I saw Balam Acab, the musical identity of Alec Jeffrey Koone, live in San Francisco at the height of the so-called witch-house movement, on December 17, 2011, at Public Works in the Mission. They played with fellow genre sorcerers, oOoOO, who opened up, apparently, though I don’t really remember. My anxiety has a way of becoming an eraser sliding across the timeline of my memory. But I do remember my expectations for the show as a writer in grad school living off the stipends from my college and nonprofit jobs, smoking too many trim-filled joints inside my East Oakland studio: how couldn’t the crowd be a bunch of hoodied wallflowers, stoned and vibing awkwardly to Acab’s beats?
Warped sludge for vocals, stretched out Detroit house bass, mixed in a glitter-lined tank of formaldehyde — Balam Acab seemed the soundtrack for a voluntarily isolated existence. I had dear friends and a girlfriend who I took to this show, but I was anxious as hell, terrified of the future, and hyper-focused on the present, one that didn’t extend beyond the weekend, the next draft of writing, the next book to read. Studying and writing for school facilitated two years of jarring switches from studious isolation to deeply intertwined community. One that included a then-burgeoning house poetry reading series throughout the city and the East Bay, with some still in existence today.
Still, the future was only measured in a week, not years, and everything felt irrelevant but the present — yet the present freaked me out, too. “I’ve never seen you drink a G&T so fast,” my then-girlfriend told me before Acab’s set, and she was right. I was intimidated by the turnout, the size of the crowd, and I started projecting something beyond enjoyment into the room that night. How dare a lively crowd in a densely populated city know about this artist, too.
I calmed down enough to thoroughly enjoy Acab and touring vocalist Morgan Laubach’s set. For his inaugural tour, Acab rearranged his songs to complement Laubach’s soprano and powerful falsetto. Doing live renditions of songs from the critically acclaimed 2011 album Wander/Wonder and 2010’s breakout See Birds EP with live vocals seemed challenging and, as evidenced by this performance filmed a month before I caught them in SF, was well-executed and, at the very least, an engaging set to catch. The comments note this was also Balam Acab’s YouTube debut. As one user put it, nine years after the documented performance, “This music was way ahead of its time, still listening to him in 2020”:
A few minutes into the new Etnies promo video, entitled PROMO, I had the feeling that this video, directed by the ever-creative cinematographer Matt King, was the kind of edit where a Balam Acab song might work.
King sonically abuses viewers (complimentary) with hard-hitting songs with deep percussion. Kick drums scrape against chalkboards in many of King’s skate video soundtracks, like Sci-Fi Fantasy’s cinematic debut, Endless Beauty. And to my surprise, the last song in PROMO, soundtracking the stunts of personal favorite Julian Lewis, was Balam Acab’s “Oh, Why” from that very 2011 debut album.
Both King and Acab subvert viewer and listener expectations. On his records, Acab’s vocals are curved race courses crashing into a straight-lane electronica scene that, through the 2010s, would be defined by EDM “wait for the drop” doldrums. King’s song choices shape his editing style, with quick and sudden cuts balancing skater’s hammers against unique tracks. His approach challenges the expectation of a traditional ‘skate punk’ or Black Sabbath soundtrack. The results are so appealing the Nidecker Group has entrusted his skills for both Etnies and Emerica’s video efforts. The use of “Oh, Why,” a subdued ambient track-turned-headnodder, juxtaposes Lewis’ daredevil tactics.
As Etnies attempts to reunite with its previous popularity and relevance, some rudimentary internet research revealed that Acab and Laubach reunited in July 2026 for a special one-off show in New York. It was also Acab’s first show in eight years. Here’s Laubach’s thoughts about performing again with her “friend from youth group growing up” and how little she was prepared for that 2011 tour when she was, at the time, barely twenty-one years old:
In May 2026, Acab released STABLIZATION (N)MODE, a 41-track collection of beats running over 90 minutes. He noted in a recent interview that he was “just a teenager taking a break from school to fulfill a record contract obligation,” living with his family while making his debut album. Today he finds Wander/Wonder sometimes “boring and basic” and other times “some tracks have the ability to make me cry out of nowhere.”
It’s important to chart ourselves in the present tense without letting it overwhelm us. We are often stuck in a nostalgia loop of sorts, us skaters. For a legacy brand like Etnies to create PROMO with the personnel involved and to try something different is worthy of a tip of the hat. Yet many of their shoes are reissues of the past. Will PROMO lead me, or more importantly, a younger generation, to buy a pair of their shoes? I’m not sure. But I’m willing to not freak out that a different approach by Etnies came to the show.
José Vadi 