Actress
What is house? What is techno?
These are questions that could send far braver and wiser men than I completely doolally, and it’s for my sanity as much as yours that I generally give them a wide berth. The dancefloor abhors ontology, etc.
I might better reduce my question to this: is house/techno (let’s conflate the two for now, a contentious act in itself, I know) a starting point or a destination? Arguably the most tedious producers, the genre-monkeys, are those for whom it is both; where the house-ness or techno-ness of a tune is a foregone conclusion – a stated intention and an efficiently achieved result. The more interesting producers – those who are artists, not just engineers – take a more uncertain path. The artists under inspection in this month’s column differ wildly in approach: some begin with house/techno, or at least an idea of what house/techno is, before unravelling it, finding within it unexpected potentials and phenomena, and building on these. Others begin with chaos, energy, pure impulse, and house/techno is what they arrive at, sometimes without even realising it themselves.
Actress, you may already know, has a new album due out next month via Honest Jon’s. Entitled Splazsh, it’s a formidable record; as dense and introverted as his debut, Hazyville, but also more expansive, more ambitious. Whereas Hazyville felt like a lean, tantalising collection of short stories, Splazsh is more of a doorstop novel. Accordingly, it requires more concentration than its predecessor, and its pace is liable to slacken at certain points, but overall its impact is deeper, and one suspects it will be more lasting. Hazyville‘s defining quality was its fitfulness, its impish stop-start quality, but Splazsh‘s tone and aesthetic is more sustained; the tracks adhere largely to house/techno form – in the sense that 4/4 rhythm, however sloppy or lopsided, presides over much of what we hear. But these beats aren’t tied to a larger structural orthodoxy – whether through design or innocence on the part of Actress (real name Darren Cunningham) I can’t be sure. None of these tracks adhere to the received “rules” and measures of house and techno, they’re structured intuitively and fluidly, and are sometimes exasperatingly unpredictable; they’re certainly not made with DJs in mind. As far as I’m concerned this is an unequivocally good thing.
Is this the first truly British-sounding techno album of the 21st century?
Of course, all this can frustrate as well. Sometimes Cunningham’s healthy anti-conservatism can sometimes mask a lack of craftmanship; not in terms of the music itself, which is gorgeously granular and tactile throughout, but in terms of narrative. On the few occasions he falls down it’s not as a stylist but as a storyteller; there are several tracks that seam to sag halfway through or meander on insensibly; the album as a whole is just a little bit overlong.
Actress’s deconstructionist approach to groove and form inevitably recalls Theo Parrish, but only so far. Actress’s production aren’t as earthy as Theo’s; they have a shiny digital-age patina, which, far from being a bad thing, actually gives them their own identity and place in time (there’s absolutely no doubting that Splazsh is a product of 2009-10). Also, for all the talk of exploration and intuition, there’s nothing at all jazzy about this album. Cunningham seems less inspired by the liquidity of jazz and more by the rigidity, and opacity, of electro; in that sense there’s definitely more of Juan and Shake in there than there is of Theo or Kenny. Though Actress has spoken before about his love of electro (from Kraftwerk to Drexciya to Daft Punk), there wasn’t much evidence of that on Hazyville; it definitely comes across on Splazsh, particularly ‘Maze’, the album’s ominous centrepiece. One thing Cunningham definitely does get from Theo is sheer crunch: the beats on ‘Bubble Butts And Equations’ and ‘Always Human’ sound like they were made with the bags of wet gravel.
If I was feeling generous I’d say that the juddering ‘Supreme Cunnilingus’ reminds me of Sun Electric or the opalescent off-funk of SND’s Atavism, but it’s nowhere near as focussed or textured as that; rather it feels a little bit, “Look! I’m mad, me!”. It’s an unnecessary show of perversity: Splazsh‘s best tracks are actually more weird than that, just in a more concealed and therefore more affecting way. One of my personal favourites is the simple but devastating ‘Futureproofing’, a short, beatless piece wherein haunted, trippy synth-arpeggios are underscored with spasms of gut-whumping sub-bass. Now that works.
Rather than being a cold-blooded enactment of “techno”, Splazsh is a beautiful, highly personal misinterpretation, or mishearing, of its tropes.
Throughout Splazsh it feels like we’re listening to an artist for whom techno is an inspiration, but not something that he wishes to imitate; indeed, techno is to Splazsh what garage was to Burial’s debut LP; ever-present, a foundation even, but somehow also a ghost, an impression, something only half-perceived – through a fug of blunted memory and YouTube overload and serotonin-depletion. Crucially, though, there’s a flamboyance, and wit, to proceedings; it’s not all rain-grey melancholy, nightbus paranoia and makeshift Pot Noodle ashtrays. There’s life and colour everwhere: see the Model 500-meets-Todd Edwards ‘Always Human’, the sinewy Metroplexisms of ‘Let’s Fly’ or the overloaded dubstep-not-dubstep of ‘Wrong Potion’. Rather than being a cold-blooded enactment of “techno”, one of those wet-ink facsimiles churned out by Motor City Drum Ensemble or whoever, Splazsh is a beautiful, highly personal misinterpretation, or mishearing, of its tropes. Hauntological house, anyone? Or simply the first truly British-sounding techno album of the 21st century?
Splazsh raises more questions than it answers, and anyone interested in the continued evolution and involution of house/techno needs to hear it.
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naykid
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blaise