On his third full length release, Paul Thomsen Kirk continues his modernized take on the late 1990s/early 2000s electronic music that is as much about dissonant textures as it is captivating beats and rhythms. It perfectly balances that sense of familiar and fresh, and it helps to renew my faith that electronic dance music can still be artistically relevant.
The first Akatombo album, Trace Elements, was released on Colin Newman and Malka Spiegel's Swim~ label in 2003, and his work continues to exemplify that label's ethos of danceable electronica with a greater artistic depth than most, even at the time it was active.Nearly a decade later, with that genre hitting lowest common denominator status of quality, it is refreshing to hear an album that innovates, while still remaining grounded and listenable.
Opener "Kleptokrat" and "Masked" both go for Kirk's take on the big beat sound, with massive, reverberating drums and dubby bass locking into a steady, monolithic groove while layers of synth noises and voice samples pop out here and there to keep things flowing.The blunt force beats appear again on "The Right Mistake," but obscured by electronic interference and machinery noise, and with the added bonus of squelchy 303 synth lines and heavy filter sweeps.
In other places, the sound has more in common with old school drum and bass, like the breakbeats and looped instruments of "Melt Again," with its over-driven noisy outbursts, definitely calls to mind the best of the late '90s."Dominion" has a similar sensibility, with its submerged beats and guitar stabs (by co-producer Makoto Kubota) pushing everything into a boisterous, but compelling mass of sound and noise.
Variety is the key here, however, and the slow, atmospheric "Shi-Shi Mai" exemplifies this, keeping the tempo slow and the rhythms quieter in the mix."Hikiko Mori" is another restrained one, more stripped down with muted beats, but an emphasis on heavily layered synth textures and spaciousness.The dark ambient "Necessary Fiction" also stands out, with an emphasis on the beatless space as opposed to driving rhythms.
Like his previous release, Unconfirmed Reports, False Positives comes in a lovingly hand-made package with a bonus DVD-R of videos by Kirk, although most of which are films made for tracks on the previous album.They fit the Akatombo sound perfectly, consisting mostly of collages and abstractions of his urban Japanese adopted homeland, with a graininess that is the perfect visual equivalent of the raw, occasionally dissonant sound on most of the tracks.
Kirk’s work as Akatombo certainly has twinges of nostalgia throughout, but it sounds very much contemporary, and manages to combine the use of big, loud rhythms with layers of moody, complex electronics.Even without the rhythms, this would be a strong work, which is no easy feat.With the beats, however, it is a complex, nuanced work that unravels more and more with each spinning.
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