R.I.P.
It doesn\'t take long for Actress\' third album to start toying with your head: only a few seconds, really, as the title track massages your brain stem and sidewinds across your speakers. And with that, we\'re in uncharted territory, caught in a vapor-trailed void between the outermost realms of electronic and experimental music. Darren Cunningham wouldn’t have it any other way. The song titles and press release for *R.I.P.* present it as a heady meditation on mortality, the Book of Genesis, and the producer’s twisted version of Plato’s cave. At least that’s what we *think* it’s about. Yet even if you don’t look at the record’s 15 very different chapters as a sample/synth-driven dissertation, it holds together as a fascinating blend of gauzy house grooves, stark minimalism, static-dredged IDM, extraterrestrial techno, and all-too-brief interludes. Get lost; you’ll enjoy every minute of it.
Darren Cunningham is a dance producer who references extroverted, populist music to create a meditative, introverted, immersive experience.
Despite being issued on 12" vinyl, "Harrier ATTK" and "Rainy Dub" would have evacuated any floor within a few seconds. None of the four tracks from those releases reappears on R.I.P., but they foreshadowed this hourlong album's completely abstract, mostly ambient composition. One exception aside, the few jacking and pulsing rhythms function more as secondary elements than focal points, swathed in fuzzy textures, mechanical drones, baleful strings, and vocal micro-samples. The majority of the album places Actress closer to the superbly creative, evocative, and mind-altering terrain inhabited by Oneohtrix Point Never, with detectable traces of early-'80s Roedelius and Moebius, as well as Autechre; there's nearly no likeness to any of the club-oriented contemporaries on the producer's Werk label. As with Splazsh, there is no template. The tracks bear little relation to one another and could have been arranged in any sequence. That said, the thrillingly scuffy friction of "The Lord's Graffiti" -- where Actress could steal and redefine Pere Ubu's "avant-garage" neologism, moving it from garage rock to U.K. garage -- seems to fade in at the perfect moment, at track 13 (of 15).
Fanatically assembling emotions and mental inductions that range from psychotropic industrialism to claustrophobic astral ascents; we once again face an Actress audio communion.