Actress – Ascending
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The Wire jumped the gun when it named Actress’s second full-length as best album of 2010. Splazsh had its moments: the warehouse industrial of “The Kettle Men,” the spare funk rubric of “Purple Splazsh.” But the nomination said more about where critical chic was headed circa the 2010s. A decade earlier, various hyperactive strains of IDM and drill’n'bass had corkscrewed the headier end of electronic music into a corner. Seekers spent the first part of the new century digging out, going minimal, and getting back to basics, whereas club culture turned indie and celebrated all things smooth and glossy. Bedroom producers continued to do their thing, but it was softer and rounder around the edges, and even that wasn’t hip.
As the decade progressed and the core genres were rebuilt, a leftfield-looking auteur had a few options. One was to envision an album as an organic, contiguously flowing experience—like it or not, this was the mold cast in the previous decade by Endtroducing, and Scott Herren struggled for many years with projects emulating this mode before succeeding with The Only She Chapters. Flying Lotus also followed this path for the rubbery grooves of Los Angeles, but then he found some new techniques in the trick bag: condensify your sound, let the blippy ornaments accrete, and write between the lines to mash in all your influences. His ambition was impressive, but I found the whole of Cosmogramma too bloated.
With his third album as Actress, Darren Cunningham could’ve grafted onto the same pattern. But though R.I.P. builds on Splazsh‘s skeletonized approximation of various genres, its fabric is mysterious, suppler. Some of that’s due to his signature, an off-kilter center of gravity—even his more nominally house and techno tracks emphasize what you wouldn’t expect, like the odd shuffling sounds that background the beat. And whereas various tracks on the last album felt like bare schematics, his embellishments here add character, and they’re tied together with mythological track names that call to mind Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Actress functions like a dark mirror, held up to fuck with traditional dance frameworks—and that was IDM, after all, a supposedly “brainier” take on club records. I don’t think R.I.P. is his masterpiece; he’s still refining the motifs he uses and the magnifying power of his lens. But there’s an insistent, pulsing absence in the track shared here, “Ascending,” that conjures to mind visual tools for writing music that we’ve envisioned for ages—a graphically precise spectrographic chart on which you can erase at will, like a chalk board. We’re nearly there, and in the meantime Actress and fellow minutiae savant Hieroglyphic Being will continue to sift the microcosmos for gold.
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Actress – Ascending [download] [buy from Honest Jon's]
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