RECOMMENDED: Actress - Splazsh [Honest Jon’s]

Thanks to Splazsh, I’ve just been reminded that it’s definitely possible to listen to a record too much before starting to review it. In the case of Darren Cunningham’s stunning second Actress full-length, the first for the Honest Jon's label, each repetition reveals hundreds of tiny details that previously managed to slip by unnoticed. Each one of these creates a separate strand of thought, and before long the mind’s struggling to try and weave every thread together into something that resembles a remotely coherent argument.

As a whole entity, what Splazsh shares with Actress' deliciously grainy debut Hazyville is its heady, self-contained quality. Cunningham’s music still sounds entirely unconcerned with the wider world outside the tight confines of its own headspace, possessed of an almost pathologically introspective bent that only begins to open up once you relax your focus and allow it to creep in. The musical equivalent of a magic eye picture then: the less you look, the more you see.

The lead track of his recent single, ‘Paint, Straw & Bubbles’ was a pretty prime example of that aesthetic. Like a jewel on display in a museum case, it appeared different from every angle, as light glinted off each facet of its surface. The nearer you got, the more frustratingly impenetrable it became – until you stopped paying such close attention and the entire thing suddenly began to make sense. With his new full-length Cunningham has picked up where that track left off and expanded his horizons even further. Actress circa-2010 has retained Hazyville’s claustrophobic feel and disconcerting habit of ending tracks at what sound like randomly calculated points and as such as it feels irrelevant to compare the two records, where his first album was a series of study sketches, Splazsh fully develops its ideas into something approaching a finished piece.

Now this is the part where I struggle to construct a reasonable summary of thoughts. It’s not quite enough to say that Splazsh has floored me - though it has, I’ve been lost in its maze-like spaces for the last few weeks and still feel as though I’ve barely scratched the surface. Its sustained mood is so well-realised that even the album’s shortest and seemingly inconsequential tracks take on an eerie physical presence. The two-minute long ‘Senorita’ drifts in mid-way, as though the needle’s been dropped onto a tiny section of a far longer track, but the way its blurred vocals seem to bleed into the shredded synthwork of ‘Let’s Fly’ gives both tracks a convincing sheen of hyper-reality.

The longer tracks (and there’s a lot of them) are stunningly composed. ‘Lost’ is the finest bit of techno-not-techno I’ve heard in a very long time, its masterful build sustained over a tension-wracked four minutes before everything drops out for a second, then unleashes. The female voices that haunt its darkened spaces are almost terrifyingly lonely, summoning the same spirit of unreal nostalgia as Millie & Andrea’s recent music. ‘Get Ohn (Fairlight Mix)’ might just be even better, grinding along behind an insistent fuzz of radio noise that’s as reminiscent of Broadcast & The Focus Group’s excellent Witch Cults Of The Radio Age as it is of any UK dance music.

In some ways it’s quite amusing that despite often being categorised alongside his contemporaries as part of the ‘bass music’ spectrum, Actress’ music is frequently devoid of the stuff. In any case, Splazsh really doesn’t need it. It’s elusive without being austere or impenetrable, complex without being IDM-ish and stubbornly refuses to land in any genre bracket, as reminiscent of recent synth-heavy albums by the likes of Oneohtrix Point Never and Emeralds as it is of techno, electro, dubstep, whatever. It’s just Actress music, and it’s almost unbelievably great.

Words: Rory Gibb
Out: Now

Links:
werkrecords.blogspot.com

RECOMMENDED: T++ - Wireless [Honest Jon’s]

So we reach the final transmission from Torsten Profrock’s ever compelling T++ project and as its final notes fade to nothingness it’s difficult not to feel a sense of sadness that his pairing with the Honest Jon’s label has come to a standstill so swiftly; when this one contains his most fully realised music yet. One cursory spin instantly reveals why. Spiralling ominously just within earshot, its source material stalks Wireless, lending these four tracks a sense of hanging dread but also, more importantly, a tangible presence in the physical world. Profrock has certainly taken full advantage of the sampling possibilities the Honest Jon’s back catalogue opened up – the label describes it as a kind of ‘remix project’, as each track has at its heart some of the label’s oldest 78 recordings of African music.

Working with this kind of disintegrating matter couldn’t be more right for T++. His music has always both signified and amplified the processes of decay, deconstructing his influences – techno, jungle, two-step – down to their barest elements before reanimating them with a blast of electricity. His remix of Shackleton’s ‘Death Is Not Final,’ itself a dusty approximation of flesh falling from bones, creaked like the undead: hard and permanent as ancient granite but also fluid, shot through with jittery junglist breaks and irresistible forward momentum. The same is true of Wireless, where he resurrects the musicians who originally recorded these tracks – at this point, who knows whether they’re dead or alive? - and gives each a new and eerily eternal life.

So during ‘Anyi’ voices rise and fall through the mix, accompanied by buzzing melodies that surface only to fall away under the weight of sub-bass and brittle percussion. His production is as gritty as ever, and placed alongside samples with such a weight of history manages to change the properties of his music to something more primitive than programmed. This is deeply ritualistic stuff – the metal wasps that buzz furiously around ‘Cropped’ moan like mourners at a burial rite, while its furiously driven pace brings to mind a macabre Day Of The Dead parade.

Of course, for all its neatly theoretical properties this is still dance music, and it fulfils that role far more directly than any previous T++ material. ‘Dig’ shuffles like garage, driven with hard edged pulses of sub-bass, and ‘Voice No Bodies’ operates on so many levels that it’s almost impossible to know which element your body is tracking. Both haunted and haunting, heady and hugely physical, Wireless is the most complete and rounded release in T++’s catalogue. It’s a shame the project’s come to an end, but if this is anything to go by whatever Profrock does next will be just as exciting.

Words: Rory Gibb
Out: Now

Link:
T++ on Discogs

RECOMMENDED: Actress - Paint, Straw & Bubbles/Maze [Honest Jon’s] & Machine & Voice EP [Nonplus+]

In advance of his eagerly awaited (from these quarters at least) second album Splazsh, Werk boss and enigmatic beat-chemist Darren Cunningham has just released a pair of beguiling 12”s under his Actress moniker. You can recognise an Actress track from a mile off - even though his more recent material displays a greater willingness to experiment than his magical Hazyville album - Cunningham’s music is defined by an instantly familiar sense of place. Tracks like ‘I Can’t Forgive You’ and sub-heavy house workout ‘Crushed’ exude a peculiar phosphorescent glow, their intensity heightened by an almost unbearable claustrophobia that presses inward as though the walls themselves are drawing nearer.

Similarly, both of the tracks on his first release for Honest Jon’s wrap themselves tightly around the listener while hinting at wide-open spaces just beyond the music’s confines. It’s a delicate balancing act – ‘Paint, Straw and Bubbles’ is almost impenetrably austere, its hypnotic spiral patterns so abstract that listening feels more like a feat of voyeuristic pleasure than one of physical connection. This distance only serves to enhance its atmosphere of deep-seated unease. ‘Maze (Long Version)’ on the flip offers more immediate gains, as thick bass frequencies and sparse electronic percussion generate a beautifully languid piece of stoned techno that seems far shorter than its six-minute runtime.

While the ‘Paint, Straw and Bubbles’ 12” offers curiously timeless artefacts, his plate for Instra:mental’s Nonplus+ label betrays its dance music lineage far more directly. ‘Machine & Voice’ does exactly what it says on the tin, playing an industrially rigid drum machine beat off against chopped ‘n’ sliced vocals. About halfway through, a woozy drift of melody, ripped straight from Flying Lotus’ ‘Parisian Goldfish’ school of sleaze, punctures the track’s heart for an all too brief few seconds before submerging again. ‘Loomin’ ratchets up the tension further, drowning a skeletal beat in waves of found sound and police sirens fading into the distance, and ‘Und U Boat’ is simply sublime, its lethargic hip-hop pace offset by the kind of aquatic melody that Highpoint Lowlife’s 10-20 has been making his own as of late.

What remains so intriguing about Actress’ music, despite its occasionally impenetrable exterior, is its constant sense of exploration. Just as he completely deconstructed Joy Orbison’s peak-time wonder ‘The Shrew Would Have Cushioned The Blow’ to leave only its trace elements behind, he displays a defiantly unconventional bent on this collection of new tracks. Never staying still for a moment, and as in thrall to the cool mechanical motion of Throbbing Gristle and This Heat as to the UK dance music he is usually associated with, Cunningham remains an artist happy to work outside any confining notions of genre or scene. If these are anything to go by, Splazsh should be fascinating, unsettling and chilling in equal measure.

Words: Rory Gibb
Out: Now & Now

Link:
www.myspace.com/actresskhz