- Akatombo, AKA Paul Thomsen Kirk, originally hails from Scotland but today lives in Hiroshima. This is his third and finest full-length album since making his debut for Colin Newman's Swim label, further exploring and refining his meld of post-punk toxic ambient angst (a la Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire) with contemporary rhythmic models. Even that is a little reductive as Akatombo defies easy categorisation with the sheer variety with which he approaches each of these 11 relatively short tracks.
Opener "Kleptocrat" sets sail over grey waves of dub, punctuated with samples from what sounds like an angry domestic scene in a TV soap. "Shi Shi Mai" emits regular laser shots across electric skeins of sickly anxiety. "Melt Again," meanwhile, features a rusting trip-hop riff cast over crashing, Erico Morricone-esque broadsides of electric guitar, an instrument which features again on "Dominion," coiling, twanging and distorted over a shuffling backbeat.
The spiral bombs of "Torsk" are something else again, in which spoken word samples bob and drown. It's followed by the motoriks of "Precariat," its ghostly U-Bahn effects hurtling towards an unknown destiny. The magisterial "Hikiko Mori" reminds—as does the thick, rhythmless swirl of "Necessary Fiction"—of Gerhard Richter's artwork, especially his treatment of real-life photography. There's a sense of a reality somehow heightened through the process of distortion and blurring.
Akatombo is big on alienation and False Positives generally conveys a feeling of being close-up to events and places while at the same time feeling disconnected and uncomprehending of them. Kirk has spoken about his feeling like an outsider in Japan despite having lived there for many years. As a filmmaker as well as musician, however, he has also been determined to eschew the obvious cliches and preconceptions people have about the country, which run from images of Geisha delicacy to Blade Runner-style dystopia. The feeling of Japan as a backdrop abounds on False Positives, but it's an unfamiliar, unnerving, scarily fascinating evocation. The album fades out with the title track, dominated by a tolling countdown, tense sampled chatter, as if this is the deadly build-up to some final moment, or endgame. False Positives is a brilliantly compelling, adrenalin-soaked antidote to the tranquil hedonism into which electronica has been too apt to lapse in recent years.
Tracklist 01. Kleptokrat
02. Melt Again
03. Shi-Shi Mai
04. The Right Mistake
05. Dominion
06. Torsk
07. Precariat
08. Hikiko Mori
09. Necessary Fiction
10. Masked
11. False Positives