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AKATOMBO  False Positives  CD   (Hand-Held Recordings)   10.98


����� Album number three of dreamy, dystopian electronica and cinematic industrial dub from Hiroshima-based Scottish ex-pat Paul Thomsen Kirk and his Akatombo project, False Positives offers a little more variation in tone compared to the mostly sinister stylings of his previous album, but fret not - this still has plenty of the surrealistic Scorn-like beatscapes and crumbling urban ambience that hooked me on this band from the beginning.

����� While Akatombo is primarily a one-man operation, on this album Kirk enlisted a number of guest musicians, who add violin, bass, and guitar to these urbanized soundscapes. At first, I was a little thrown off by the hypnotic, house-like throb that runs through opener "Kleptokrat", but after that unexpectedly uplifting opening, things take a more ominous and paranoid turn. You get the deep bass and sun-scorched, almost Morricone-esque melodies that wind around the speaker-rattling rhythms of "Melt Again", and the bassbin-rattling midnight pulse of "Shi-Shi Mai"; those tracks remind me of the sort of bleak, brooding "darkhop" that Economy Records and Pathological used to traffic in back in the 90s, a sound that I'm still a huge fan of but which you don't hear too often anymore. It's definitely one aspect of Akatombo's music; while this album isn't as desolate as the likes of Scorn or Ocosi, Kirk crafts some sublimely sinister vibes throughout it all, bringing together rattling dub-style effects and echoing snares with deep, hypnotic bass lines and washes of surreal street sounds like something half-dreamed at 2 a.m., the distorted beats slipping in and out of focus, and distorted guitars searing the shadowy gloom that stretches beneath many of these tracks. "The Right Mistake" gleams coldly in this dreamlike soundworld, its skittering technoid beats looping endlessly beneath washes of sleek nocturnal ambience and spacey electronics, while "Dominion" takes something resembling a mutant rockabilly lick, all shimmering tremolo and twang, and welds it to an even more infectious bone-rattling breakbeat. The monstrous boom-bap of "Masked" is the most overtly dub out of all these tracks, huge, spacious rhythms swept up in a surreal rush of reverb, flowing into the desolate industrial clank of the title track. And it's all immersed in an array of gorgeous droneworks, moody orchestral strings and swaths of filmic ambience. Through his unique alchemical touch, Kirk transforms these seemingly disparate sounds into a captivating listening experience.

����� This limited-edition version of False Positives comes in a beautifully hand-assembled package, and also comes with a DVDR that features videos for some of the hardest, darkest tracks off both this album and Unconfirmed Reports. Each one is an assemblage of flickering images of urban desolation, processed video entropy, and abstract Brakhage-esque imagery all laced with a disquieting vibe.


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