On his latest release, London-based Darren Cunningham, under his moniker Actress, has a lofty agenda planned for you. And he won’t let you know what it is before he’s ready. In “Ghettoville”, Actress doesn’t so much try to capture you and rope you in against your will – he’s more interested in inconspicuously “doing his thing” and seductively drawing you in as Ulysses to the sirens. He accomplishes this goal on his terms, all the while making you think they’re your own. For most people who wield this power this is carte blanche for terror, but Actress harbors no such nefarious intentions. You’re just in for a hell of a complex and contrastive album, and he knows it, and paradoxically prefers subtlety in approach. The first half of “Ghettoville,” in fact, is a lesson in allurement – how to pull listeners in with charm rather than a [insert your own apt metaphor: shotgun, sledgehammer, club, etc.].

Even in comparison with Actress’s last album from 2012, “R.I.P.”, “Ghettoville” restrains from giving it all away at once. After you’re lured in by the first two tracks, you could be forgiven for worrying you’ve just started an ambient or drone album, and that Actress has taken a somewhat unexpected turn for the worst. However, those tracks handed you enough bait to keep you going, and the next half-dozen tracks deliver on the sweet, electronic goodness that has rightly earned Actress his reputation. Continuing with the metaphor, it’s all the way into the 13th track, “Don’t,” that you hear the first discernable lyrics, and you realize there are others around, but only briefly, because then only “Rap” and “Rule” have lyrics, and the album ends much on the same calming, seductive tone as the one on which it opened.

Musically, “Ghettoville” borrows from an astonishing breadth of musical influences. Obviously, true to Actress form, I could describe the album as an electronic album with a minimalist aesthetic, but that would make it sound supremely less exciting than it actually is. Discerning listeners will notice between the bookending ambient/drone tracks hints of dark indietronica a la Röyksopp and The Knife (“Corner,” “Rims”), vague reminiscences of – strange as it might sound – late disco (“Gaze”), and even a drum/flute combo that reminds me of some 80s and 90s pop (“Birdcage”). As an electronic album in the general sense, there are plenty of nods to the emergent canon like Laurel Halo and Forest Swords. More than these other artists, though, Actress manages to reach as ostentatiously as he wants yet retain the cohesiveness necessary to make the album feel like a totality – a whole. This isn’t a collection of singles – it’s an album in the purist’s pretentious meaning of the word.

“Ghettoville” is a minimalist album all the way from the tunes themselves — “Rims” and “Don’t” have 4 notes apiece, for instance — to the single-worded track names. Within the relatively limited confines of minimalism’s occupiable space, though, Actress manages to play around quite a bit with his listeners. Take the album title, a playful sense of larger community forged out of the disparaging terms used to describe people via the proxy of places. On “Don’t” Actress pleads his listeners not to “stop the music,” which, if you have any appreciation of electronic music, was the furthest thing from your mind when you first hear it.

It takes Actress over an hour to complete it, but “Ghettoville” provides a whimsical survey of electronic music as a whole. Reaching broadly for new ideas yet still grounded in those feel-good energizing beats. Experimenting with production to divorce from sleek polished keys toward crackling, distorted, glitched-out melodies, but unable to fully give up the former (and why should they?). “Ghettoville” extends these realms and reminds us that creativity is alive and well in electronic music.

17

Add to the story...