Available on: Houndstooth
Perversely, in recent years, anonymity has become a promotional tactic in itself, a means of fostering intrigue or mystique in a modern media landscape that often appears fixated on an unseemly degree of TMI. For Manchester’s Akkord, anonymity has proven a pretty useful tool, and not for entirely cynical reasons. We know the name of the two main players – Liam Blackburn and Joe McBride, aka Indigo and Synkro, a pair of Manchester producers who have together chalked up releases on labels such as Exit, Apollo and R&S. Akkord, though, functions as a sort of codename for collective operation – a way in which familiar and like-minded producers can interact and collaborate while discreetly drawing a veil over the project’s inner workings.
There’s something kind of cool about it too, of course: promo shots in silhouette, sleeves hinting at arcane symbolism, and the opportunity to follow curious promotional ideas, with tracks disseminated through mysterious phone hotlines, flyer packs handed out at Warehouse Project, or as cassette-only singles. Luckily, Akkord’s music is a neat fit to this curious, dark vibe. Their debut LP, released on Fabric imprint Houndstooth, appears to draw lines between numerous points: the misty dread of jungle; the complex and rhythmic bass music of Shackleton and his Skull Disco colleagues; and, if you’re willing to go back a bit, to the muscular dub-techno throb that Leftfield perfected on ‘Rhythm And Stealth’.
These diverse styles are made one through a production style that errs towards the crisp, clinical and precise. The likes of ‘3dOS’ and ‘Navigate’ might feel almost sterile were it not for the weird gloaming that shimmers around their edges, a subliminated menace that’s more effective for never quite breaking cover. Throughout ‘Smoke Circle’, we hear what might be an Aboriginal chant. On ‘Folded Edge’, a bass note levitates serenely as cracked breakbeats fly past like orbiting space wreckage. Brows will furrow as ears try to discern the origin of that spooky clatter that persists through the murky synth drones and leaden 4/4 of ‘Channel Drift’. In interview, Blackburn and McBride have hinted at more esoteric interests in sacred geometry and arcane symbolism, and undoubtedly there are mysteries here. Track six is titled ‘Hex_ad’ – ‘six’ in Greek – and is deploys the sort of unusual polyrhythms that a musicologist could have a field day with. Not that you really need to engage too heavily with that to sink into ‘Akkord’, though: as ever, there is pleasure to be found in something that doesn’t give up its secrets too easily.
