One of the upshots of dance music's active compartmentalization-- into genres and subgenres and niches aligned with certain kinds of basslines or BPM-- is the exalted space it affords work that jams the system. If an album proves unique, we celebrate it. And then that album makes us think all the more scrupulously about the system it happened to jam. Actress's Splazsh is one of those albums. Actress-- a DJ/producer from London named Darren Cunningham-- slots into a recognizable realm of artists working in the wake of dubstep. But little, if anything, in his sound shares much with dubstep as it's most often understood. His bass isn't very big, his snares don't crack in isolation, his atmospheres don't heave in the air of cavernous negative-space.
So what's the link? A certain formal seriousness and rigor-- a sense of tracks transpiring the way they do for reasons owing to some kind of project, whatever that project (probably rhythmic and arcane) may be. But such talk downplays the many visceral thrills of Splazsh. Even the subtle stuff has an immediate effect: By the end of its sneakily weird eight minutes, opener "Hubble" has gently pushed the album into a sort of spinning motion that speeds up and slows down, but never quite stops. The slow-motion speed lets Actress throw in an array of sounds he'll sort through in time: woozy ambient waves, dry drums, crazy lasers, a slow synth arpeggio that sounds lifted from some old grainy sci-fi movie.
And so Splazsh keeps spinning, even as it moves through floaty dreamscapes strewn with sighs and chimes ("Lost") and austere breakbeat abstractions ("Get Ohn [Fairlight Mix]"). There's almost nothing that ties such disparate tracks together, except for everything. And that everything owes to the simultaneous sense of adventure and control that has made Actress one of the most intriguing electronic-music makers at work today.
Actress himself has called his music "R&B concrète," and that helps illuminate the way he works from both inside and outside a track. He has an ear for building up a song from the bottom (like a pop producer) and then abstracting it from the top (like a musique concrète technician), so that he makes some incredibly strange sounds surprisingly palatable-- and without making a big show of their strangeness. In that, Actress shares a certain allegiance with post-dubstep artists like Zomby (who has made records for the label that Actress runs, Werk Discs). But there's a range of hooks and ideas at play in Splazsh that few others have approached, much less made coherent.
