- Actress gets meditative on his calmest record yet.
- On Actress's tenth album, Statik, he reimagines himself as an ambient techno artist. It's not a terribly dramatic reinvention. Darren J. Cunningham has always threaded distant pads and radar blips between four-on-the-floor kicks, but that was just a small part of the polyglot riot of sound one could expect after dropping the needle on a record like last year's LXXXVIII. The UK producer is typically a mad scientist in the studio, augmenting his greyscale garage and techno with the genre-agnostic mischief of a Moodymann or Theo Parrish. On Statik, which he composed in an "extensive flow state," he’s an island of (relative) calm.
Statik rolls back free jazz curveballs and corrugated hip-hop beats to focus on windblown hiss and radio interference. There’s a wintry solemnity to even the more propulsive club tracks, like "Rainlines" and "Dolphin Spray." If the latter’s staccato square-wave synths bring to mind Lil Wayne’s "Lollipop," the gauzy atmospheres skew a little more towards jj’s "Ecstasy." The titular static is like a blanket of snow over everything, and it gets the starring role on the title track and "Doves Over Atlantis," cascading through the stereo field and seeming to turn itself inside out. The drums sound muffled throughout, and the paranoid mutterings and creepy vocal samples that filled the margins of past records have quieted for the time being, giving the album a more reassuring tone. Plucky sequencers give the music a meditative, expansive, almost New Age feel, suggesting that Actress has been diving into the catalogue of his new label Smalltown Supersound, which hosts Norwegian space-disco producers Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas. It's a more limited mode for the UK producer, but his sly wit still shines through.
It's a testament to the richness and strangeness of Actress's catalog that Statik, a musical moonscape by most standards, is one of his most accessible albums. Squint a little and you could imagine Sampha singing over the doleful minor chords on "Rainlines," at least until the beat starts disappearing in and out of pockets of hiss. There’s nothing as potentially alienating as LXXXVIII’s "Typewriter World," whose hollow metal scrapes and horror-movie synths made it sound like it was going on the fritz. Ambient tracks like "Doves Over Atlantis" feel more reassuring than endless lacunae like "Voodoo Posse Chronic Illusion" from the Silver Cloud EP.
Still, Cunningham's approach isn't exactly friendly. He opens the album by putting a brief melody and distant snatch of percussion through the wringer on "Hell," suggesting a Dantean punishment for a DJ in the afterlife: is he doomed to be bit-crushed and time-stretched for eternity? Laser zaps and machine clicks occupy the textural margins, and it takes four minutes for these elements to congeal into anything resembling a steady rhythm.We don't hear anything else resembling club music until the third track, "My Ways," fades in, picking up considerable steam before fading out after just over a minute of pumping hi-hats and dissolved soul samples. Cunningham revels in the ability of the producer to play God, imposing arbitrary rules on his world, creating beautiful pieces of music only to torture and kill them as he sees fit.
Actress is still working at something like the peak of his powers, and there's never a wrong step on Statik—never an idea that falls flat, never a moment where Cunningham feels like he's compromising his sound rather than simply choosing to work in a smoother style on his latest whim. But you're not going to be listening to this thing slack-jawed and agog. Here he's content to hang back, put his more out-there ideas on the backburner and just be really, really good.
Tracklist01. Hell
02. Static
03. My Ways
04. Rainlines
05. Ray
06. Six
07. Cafe Del Mars
08. Dolphin Spray
09. System Verse
10. Doves Over Atlantis
11. Mello Checx