Review: Akatombo - False Positives

Rhythm is the harness in False Positives; the one grounding element that prevents the listener from becoming lost and overwhelmed by Akatombo’s eclectic mix of texture plucked from all sorts of genre extremities. Sound rises up in waves, taking fleeting spells in the foreground before fading within the fresh assortment of noises that arrives to subsume it – everything spins and hovers in an unsettled flux, with the exception being those central rhythmic loops through which the listener can avert dizziness and disorientation and spark connection with the album’s steady, recurrent constant.

Even when False Positives appears to wander into sparser territory, the air is still thick with tiny molecules of detail; waves of static that hang behind the melodies like an ever-present traffic noise, or the faint hums that sound like operational whirrings of a power generator. “The Right Mistake” is one of the album’s simpler outings and yet heaves with these musical micro-organisms, with a stuttering, thumping techno underbelly pulsing beneath the hisses and angle grinders of some kind of futuristic factory. Particularly prominent during this track is the warmth and rough edges that ooze out of the grooves, with the track’s relentless bass drum more closely resembling a fleshy circulatory pulse than a clinical dancefloor thud.

Elsewhere, Akatombo scours the rhythms of trip hop and garage, with tempo often taking drastic accelerations and decelerations between tracks. The tambourines and lo-fi kit of “Torsk” recline into a looser mantra of mid-tempo – suitably surrounded by a phased whoosh of noise that spirals like a helix – while “Precariat” immediately follows with a driving electro-kraut, stumbling untidily outside the strict parameters of quantisation and crackling and beeping with the noises of an aircraft cockpit, ending in a glorious 30-second coda through which the listener ejector-seats into the luscious ambience of the skies. A truly euphoric sensory overload.