Statik by Actress
‘Statik’ by Actress
In the mass consciousness, electronic music is like comic books: a medium judged too much for its most famous message. For comic books, that message is “flights ‘n’ tights,” a.k.a. superhero stuff; for electronic music, it’s heavy dance beats meant to crowd club floors.
In his guise as Actress, English musician Darren Cunningham, not unlike famed English comic-book writer Alan Moore, persistently explores the possibilities of his medium. And Statik, his tenth Actress studio album, is expansively introspective.
Introspective, but hardly insular: within the six minutes and 15 seconds of the opener, “Hell,” Cunningham moves from ambient submersion to fractured blips and voices that enter and leave as if they’re sunspot-afflicted radio transmissions, and then to a guiding beat that would almost be a chill-out if the fractures weren’t still there.
Those fractures enhance the sense that Cunningham—a frequent remixer for and collaborator with people ranging from indie singer-songwriter Soccer Mommy to English R&B sensation Sampha—is using his current flow to relish solitude, and to encourage the listener to relish it with him, most likely via the enforced isolation of headphones.
Cunningham hasn’t discarded the beats that you can dance or just bob your head to: “Six” could sharpen any waning alertness for an after-midnight drive down a deserted highway bathed in cobalt lights, and the following track, “Café del Mars,” could just as well be a counterpoint to the arriving train or landing plane that contains, or is, the reason you made the drive.
Yet those beats aren’t raisons d'être. The pulse of a six-minute contemplation like “Doves Over Atlantis” is so deliberately faint that a doctor might have trouble locating it, while the main rhythmic force of “System Verse” is a distant-thunder rumble. Actress often makes music as though undertaking a journey, and Statik is a mesmeric trip through Cunningham’s dream-states—his moods are the messages.
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