Bonafide Magazine @ MSN: Review: Actress – Ghettoville

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Review: Actress – Ghettoville Posted: 27 Jan 2014 04:09 AM PST   It seems important to open with a warning: Ghettoville is not an immediately likeable album. Previous records by Actress, Splaszh and R.I.P. being the two most recent and notable, have offered a fractured, kinetic take on dance and electronic music. In stark contrast, Ghettoville feels like a suspension of the present. Opener Forgiven is constructed from an almost stationary loop that owes more to industrial act Throbbing Gristle than any contemporary of Actress. It stretches for seven minutes with a sense of fatigued foreboding, with something like thunder rumbling in and out. This dedicated repetitiveness is a strategy Actress employs throughout the album, turning the experience of listening to the album in its entirety into something of a grind. However, beneath this lies a sophisticated conceptual and aesthetic preoccupation that sets Actress apart as an innovator, even at his most alienating and difficult. Actress, real name Darren Cunningham, released a press statement for Ghettoville suggestive of a fatigue beyond simple exhaustion. It talked with a retrospective finality about proceedings, "four albums in and the notes and compositions no longer contain decipherable language." In fact, the language of Ghettoville is very decipherable, drawing from a palette of dance and electronic music even as it subverts those forms. This is music reaching a dead-end and offering very little in terms of a get-out clause. For all the difficulty of the work, it contains some sublime moments. Our erupts like a visitation from previous albums, a neatly porcelain melody line lifting the static shadow, before being followed with Time and a returning apprehension. Ghettoville contains many such transitions, for example the burst of house music references that comprise Gaze and Skyline leap out from a surrounding enervating sway. Actress revels in contrasting movement with non-movement, taking palpable risks with what a listener might feasibly tolerate. If listened to in the wrong mood, sections of Ghettoville can be oppressively bleak. Album closer Grey Over Blue is unforgiving in its stasis, but all the same it indicates a difficult to pin-point innovation. Perhaps it is precisely the lack of compromise, the risk that accompanies the record as an evocative exercise in conceptualising the traumas that exist under electronic dance music. For all the progression, it is a genre that is increasingly a reflection of our cultural psychosis in the face of an overloaded information-age. Simultaneously contrasting the twitchy, unceasing flow of transition for transition's sake and dogmatic reassertion of rhythm, dance music (of all genres) reflects the sensation of living in an over-stimulated end-time. Actress strips his content of any comforting tricks, and in doing so he has suggested something beyond a mere compromise between elements. It may not sound like fun, but Ghettoville is a vital and telling record, a clearing of the ground for whatever comes next. Words: Andrew Spragg