Ak’chamel are an avant-garde Texas-based musical duo who bring ancient ideas of ritual folk magic to contemporary audiences. They perform in ancient-looking costumes with shamanic features, concealing their identities behind wooden masks, gloves, disintegrating fibrous shrouds, and bulbous, textured robes. Ak’chamel usually attach an epithet to the group’s name, which they frequently change: They’ve released albums as “Ak’chamel, the Giver of Illness” and “Ak’chamel, the Crazed and Sunchalked Bones of the Vanished Herds,” which invite a foreboding sense that their arrival is something to fear. But what they bring are psychedelia-infused sociopolitical critiques of the sickness that is modern life. Ak’chamel’s music articulates a truth about a psychic pain that’s easy to pathologize. In the

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