Album: Splazsh
Artist: Actress
Although Splazsh never settles on one style -- it's more like a tour of the horizon of dance music -- what unites the songs on this album is a pop sensibility mixed with an artist's desire to deconstruct and create "sound sculptures" rather than conventional club tracks. I'm not sure if Let's Fly, for example, has ever been played in a nightclub but I can imagine it would cause some confusion among the revellers. Though techno is at the heart of Splazsh, some of the genres that Actress moves through include Chicago house, grime, hip hop, funk and electropop, with tracks like Maze sounding deeply indebted to Kraftwerk. Like his German krautrock predecessors, Actress has a deep love for sound production machinery and on Supreme Cunnilingus he has his instruments involved in what sounds like an intimate sexual act. There are other light-hearted moments, such as the 80s TV theme pastiche of Purrple Splazsh, and tracks like these make Splazsh one of Actress' most accessible albums. Other highlights are Lost and the dubstep-influenced Wrong Potion. As is often the case with Actress albums, there's a lot to take in but the listener gets taken to places where electronic music hasn't been before. His third LP, R.I.P. (2012), was another completely new direction for Actress (it has fewer beats and was apparently inspired by Milton's Paradise Lost), while Ghettoville (2014) explores drone and, according to interviews with Cunningham, maybe his last record. That would be a real shame; what he pulls off is a rare feat (and one that few musicians today, Burial and Oneohtrix Point Never aside, ever achieve), which is to take extroverted musical forms and turn them into an introverted, meditative experience. This is something an old raver like me appreciates especially.
Born: Wolverhampton, West Midlands
Released: June 2010
Genre: Electronic
Darren Cunningham is in the same lineage of highly individual, innovative UK musicians as Richard D James (it's no coincidence that Aphex Twin's Syro and Actress' Ghettoville were two of the best electronic records in 2014). Born in Wolverhampton but based in south London, Cunningham has released four LPs as Actress, starting with Hazyville in 2008, its title a reference to the copious amounts of weed smoked during its creation, but the music and beats are razor sharp. Whereas Burial's music was haunted by the ghosts of jungle and UK garage, Hazyville was indebted to Detroit techno and the wonky beats of Madlib. The end of the noughties was a transitional time for UK dance music, with the impetus behind dubstep and grime starting to wane, and Actress was at the cutting edge of a new trend for merging different styles of club music with little concern for boundaries. The murkiness of Hazyville cleared for Actress' next record, Splazsh, which has a richer and more varied sound but retains that uncanny weirdness in his music. Cunningham himself has described his songs as "studies": on Splazsh, Hubble can be seen as a study of Prince's Erotic City, while Always Human is made out of sounds from The Human League's Human. This shows a playfulness in Actress' music slightly at odds with the dank grey melancholy and urban paranoia in Burial's sound; Untrue doesn't contain anything as unhinged as the funky house of Always Human or the propulsive but snaking beats of Let's Fly.
Although Splazsh never settles on one style -- it's more like a tour of the horizon of dance music -- what unites the songs on this album is a pop sensibility mixed with an artist's desire to deconstruct and create "sound sculptures" rather than conventional club tracks. I'm not sure if Let's Fly, for example, has ever been played in a nightclub but I can imagine it would cause some confusion among the revellers. Though techno is at the heart of Splazsh, some of the genres that Actress moves through include Chicago house, grime, hip hop, funk and electropop, with tracks like Maze sounding deeply indebted to Kraftwerk. Like his German krautrock predecessors, Actress has a deep love for sound production machinery and on Supreme Cunnilingus he has his instruments involved in what sounds like an intimate sexual act. There are other light-hearted moments, such as the 80s TV theme pastiche of Purrple Splazsh, and tracks like these make Splazsh one of Actress' most accessible albums. Other highlights are Lost and the dubstep-influenced Wrong Potion. As is often the case with Actress albums, there's a lot to take in but the listener gets taken to places where electronic music hasn't been before. His third LP, R.I.P. (2012), was another completely new direction for Actress (it has fewer beats and was apparently inspired by Milton's Paradise Lost), while Ghettoville (2014) explores drone and, according to interviews with Cunningham, maybe his last record. That would be a real shame; what he pulls off is a rare feat (and one that few musicians today, Burial and Oneohtrix Point Never aside, ever achieve), which is to take extroverted musical forms and turn them into an introverted, meditative experience. This is something an old raver like me appreciates especially.
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