- No one comes close to matching the strength of Akkord's razor-edged beats. That's all the more remarkable given how straightforward Synkro and Indigo's blueprint is: a combination of the most austere aspects of techno and drum & bass. By the time they released their debut album in 2013, they had it down to a science. They followed the record with a four-track EP that was even more deadly, yet it went strangely overlooked. Now Houndstooth have collected those four tracks and thrown in some remixes (two new, two old).
HTH020 shows Akkord at their best, full of tense silences and swooping dynamics. On "Gravure" and "Greyscale" the duo look back to their dubstep-referencing first EPs. The former has a swing that feels like a rough shoulder-check, while "Greyscale" has the torpor of a trip-hop track, with every synth trail and drum break commanding enormous gravity. Breaks rule on the other two cuts—"Continuum" lets them somersault in suspension, and "Typeface" assembles the drums into an orderly techno strut, which helps nail down their more chaotic tendencies.
All four remixers use elements from several tracks, making their efforts feel more like originals. Vatican Shadow's track is as mournfully metronomic as usual, but it replaces his usual grit with Akkord's surgical sheen. Regis's "Whip Hand Mix" drags the duo's rhythms down into a swampy throb. The Haxan Cloak takes apart the whole EP and rebuilds it into a ten-minute walk through a terrifying haunted house, using Akkord's metallic sound palette as a base for seriously brutal glitching effects and punishing drums. Fellow Tri Angle man Fis's "Hayfield To New Mills Version" has an eerie pastoral quality, contrasting passages of folk instrumentation with blasts of crunchy noise that sound like Akkord tracks set on fire—think "DMT Usher" but even more destructive. All four guests turn in stellar tracks that go beyond the remit of a remix, which speaks to Houndstooth's curatorial prowess as well as the power of Akkord's original material.
Tracklist01. Gravure
02. Continuum
03. Typeface
04. Greyscale
05. HTH020 (The Haxan Cloak's Cloud Of Witness)
06. Typeface / Greyscale (Vatican Shadow's The World Is Complete)
07. Gravure / Continuum (Fis Hayfield To New Mills Version)
08. Gravure / Continuum (Regis Whip Hand Mix)