There’s no Actress release without cryptic promo poetry and a thematic superstructure that in the end only he understands. Or maybe not? Where ‘LXXXVIII’ last unpacked chessboards and dressed up game theory in beats, ‘Statik’, Cunningham’s first release on the Norwegian label Smalltown Supersound, feels like a ballast-free, no-nonsense album on which he does not try to locate techno in a parallel world or use his machines to open the door to the future. Producing music that sounds the way the artwork looks is something Actress has always been good at.
So he returns to perhaps his best musical period, the early 2010s, and throws a literally raging party with the last of the ghosts he found in the woods. He takes the tempo out of things and serves up these bleeps, fog-soaked, sparse beats and a touch of funk to redefine the dancefloor. The tracks don’t work towards a goal, but lay their cards on the table from the very first note. Take “Dolphin Spray”, which spins in circles with its wobbly bass, the gently trembling “Ray”, which tries to hide its beat, or “Café del Mars”, which sounds like a scored meteor shower interrupting an awkward dance manoeuvre with its minimalist stomping and scraping noises. Needless to say, Actress remains number one.
Statik
