She should have retired the Actress name many years ago and moved on to something else. Instead, Darren J. Cunningham is busier than ever, first with “LXXXVIII” (2023), and this year with “Statik”, eleven new misty electronic compositions on the border between techno, ambient and glitchy offal soaked in autumn fog. A world of its own, in which time does not necessarily stand still but advances at a different pace compared to the rest of the carousels of contemporary electronics. Far from the most excited trends of London clubs, in fact, Actress continues her path hard-nosed without looking around, a particularly shy way of doing things, which has now taken her to Scandinavia, to the headquarters of Smalltown Supersound. Title and cover image allude to leaden and moody atmospheres, as already undertaken by “Karma & Desire” four years ago, but it is the names of the tracks in the set list that offer the most pertinent clue about the contents: an aquatic and deep sound, flecked with rhythm and radio interference, immersed in the backdrop of an ambient heart.
Of course, opening the album with a song called “Hell” is clearly provocative, but between static and hisses beat disjointed, the piece wanders intermittently for over six minutes of authorial incommunicability, discovering the strengths and weaknesses of a producer highly idiosyncratic – a situation then exasperated by the subsequent short interludes “Static” and “My Ways”, which raise the level of paranoia over a dull digital dust.
It is therefore with the expansive “Rainlines” that the album finally takes off through exotic new age references, then dives with naked emotion into the dust of “Ray”, finally carrying out that spleen that Actress too often keeps hidden. The idea behind “Café del Mars” is admirable, which misrepresents the famous collections lounge in a Martian touch progressive electronic reminiscent of the works of SSIEGE and Ana Roxanne, while a dry but relevant swerve by drum machines makes “Dolphin Spray” the simplest and most descriptive song in the setlist. And if “System Verse” again misrepresents the lulling aquatic calm in a menacing flight of mechanical birds, the gaseous keyboards of “Doves Over Atlantis” fade into an oblique sci-fi landscape, in the wake of Huerco S. and the lysergic forest explorations of GAS.
On her tenth studio album, Actress continues her solo journey, bent over the mixer without paying attention to the audience gathered around. Dense listening and sometimes too mute in its timbral research, “Statik” pays for uniformity of approach and lacks that spark capable of making it jump back into the limelight of the electronic scene, as in the times of “Splazsh” and “RIP”. But the intent of an instrumental album is never as apparent as one might think, even if you consume packs of them every month: with an ear pricked up to the frequencies of the night sky, and an ever-present nervousness just below the knob's thread, Actress confirms itself producer of choice for those moments of intense silence of the soul.
04/11/2024
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
