Ghettoville
Over three albums and numerous remixes, Darren Cunningham (a.k.a. Actress) established himself as one of avant-garde electronic music\'s most exciting producers, chewing up and spitting out genres like house, techno, dubstep, and abstract noise to achieve his singularly dystopic vision. Cunningham announced his retirement with the release of his fourth and final album, *Ghettoville*, which might explain why it\'s his most challenging listen yet. With a few notable exceptions (\"Gaze,\" \"Skyline\"), the album is void of beats. Instead, it\'s a monolithic slab of undulating textures—at times cacophonous, at times sublime. It opens with \"Forgiven,\" a heady stew of crackling static, which persists through \"Street Corp.\" \"Corner\" will get your head nodding with its playfully robotic lilt, but tracks like \"Contagious\" and \"Time\" bring you right back to the sonic junkyard. Cunningham is known for his cerebral productions, and this is an especially heady note to go out on.
Darren Cunningham's fourth album as Actress is a record that takes his fascinations—Detroit techno, Chicago ghetto house, rap—and repeatedly kicks them in the ribs. After three collections that played Jenga with genre rules, Ghettoville is content to wallow in the ruins of the musics its predecessors so fascinatingly deconstructed.
A seventy minute sustained gaze into the dark, uncomfortable at first until the eyes adjust, the patterns take shape and those shadows start to dance.
When the January 2014 release date and track list of Darren Cunningham's fourth Actress album was announced, the artist wrote some accompanying words that could be summarized as a resigned "whatever," or as an emoticon signifying a sigh, or as a rant ghost-written by Jaden Smith.
Billed as the sequel to Hazyville – which may inadvertently suggest that 2012's R.I.P., Darren Cunningham's most whole and open work to date, was, on the contrary, a tangent, a bastard child – Ghettoville is a quite purposeful step backwards for Actress; in lucidity, at least. In a statement dispatched alongside news of the album's release, he hinted at a deliberate devolution, leaving a record that has no 'decipherable language'; and besides the use of a handful of sampled watchwords that serve more to haunt than clarify, there is indeed no vocabulary – nor, perhaps, message – here.
While many artists tend to spend their careers beefing up their sound, Darren Cunningham takes the opposite approach.
Album review: Actress - 'Ghettoville'. The final LP under Darren Cunningham's Actress moniker, out on Ninja Tune, receives the Clash seal of approval...
Inside Actress's narcotic murk, sinuous melodies lurk, writes<strong> Kitty Empire</strong>
Ghettoville is a 70-minute high-wire act, equal parts musique concrète and concrete jungle.
<p>Whether or not you call Darren Cunningham's fourth album techno, its genre-bending dystopian vibe impresses <strong>Tim Jonze</strong></p>