����� Since getting hooked on the works of Scottish expat Paul Kirk, who currently resides in Hiroshima, Japan, I've been picking up most of the stuff that he's released under the Akatombo banner over the past decade, all of it steeped in an atmosphere of urban isolation and paranoia. Following the project's 2003 debut on UK label Swim, Akatombo proceeded to release a series of increasingly experimental albums on his own label Hand-Held, tracing his early forays into grim, jazz-tinged industrial breakbeat to the more complex and aggressive sound of his most recent work. All of the Akatombo albums are consistently good, though, displaying a sound that can often resemble a vaguely jazzy, more layered take on the dystopian industrial dub practiced by the likes of Scorn and Techno Animal in the 90s, but fleshed out with Kirk's cinematic use of samples, drones and electronics, creating these imaginatively rendered soundscapes beamed back from the fringes of a entropic technological wasteland.

����� Akatombo's second album Unconfirmed Reports is one of the darkest of his albums, and one of my favorites. From the brooding, sinister boom-bap of opener "Friend For Hire" and the skittering paranoia of "Pragmatism", to the swirling, 'gazey noise-trance of "Tondo" and the sprawling drones of "Cypher", the project produces a dense array of largely instrumental electronic music, burying ominous samples beneath a layer of sonic murk, shifting the shuffling breakbeats into more distorted, penetrative rhythms, cloaking these sounds in sleek black electronics and metallic burnish. Clanking, dub-stained beats are at the rhythmic core of the album, but these are also shot through with striking moments of vaporous dark ambience and squalls of distorted noise. Equally effective are the hallucinatory noir-esque darkjazz elements that begin to show up halfway through Reports.

����� Echoes of late-90s Scorn ripple through these tracks, especially when Akatombo drapes those sheets of malevolent electronic ambience over hard-edged breakbeats, the percussive snap of the drum loops echoing through the shadows, sending off tracers of dubby deliria. But it's much more immersive, heavily expanding on that sound with contemporary techniques and imaginative soundscaping, weaving chilling minor key melodies and looping musical fragments around the hypnotic, gritty beats and surges of nocturnal electronics, incorporating additional sounds of guitar and violin, bringing a shadowy melodic quality to the music. It's all quite evocative of rain-slick city streets in the middle of the night, black asphalt glistening beneath the cold hard glow of halogen lamps, surrounded by towers of glass and concrete thrusting into a black starless sky. It's a fine addition to your illbient/isolationist dub shelf for sure, highly recommended (as are all of the Akatombo albums) to anyone hooked on the bleak narcotized beatscapes of Scorn and Techno Animal and even Muslimgauze.

����� Comes in a large, oversized printed envelope that contains a set of full-color insert cards, newspaper clippings, and a home burned DVDR that features haunting, experimental music videos for two of the tracks from the album and a "Hikiko Mori" from the False Positives album, each copy hand-numbered in an edition of five hundred copies.