The producer known as ACTRESS and his r&b concrète

this is great! listened to previous album at the time and it left no impression, maybe i was too hasty

'r&b concrète' is the sort of self decription that usually entices and then disappoints but it's quite fitting in this case

this fuckin BURIES the competition

post linx

there's a mediafire link on the second page of results, idk

and

http://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4141569-lost-10-of-2010-1--actress-splazsh

"r&b concrète" is not an 'enticing' description lmao

self description

kinda is

ilx is full of ppl having their grand claims for their music dismissed, just this once u gotta allow it's kinda apt

it could be apt

zvookster, runoff

Been listening to this for the last ten days or so... there are a few songs ("Lost" especially) that stood out right away. The rest I've been warming up to.

Wire named this their #1 album of the year, btw.

yeah i'm guessing a few respondents itt will have seen it there

not an egregiously 'wire'ish album tho, i can imagine ppl who have never heard of luc ferrari enjoying it

excellent album, though not quite one of my very favorites of the year. i've been playing it for a month or two, and enjoy it while it's on, but find that it leaves little impression after the fact. i wonder if this is perhaps due to the fact that it inhabits a genre i spend little time with (i have never heard of luc ferrari, ftr), so i'm less able to identify its most distinctive traits? anyway, i particularly enjoy the stretch from "maze" through "let's fly," songs that fans of this type of thing never seem to mention.

don't wanna sound like a hater, but it's ok. I can see how people who haven't heard Steve Poindexter and Musique Records and Hieroglyphic Being might find it groundbreaking -- it kinda straddles the middle ground between that sound, and the abstract side of US deep house like DJ Qu and M. Pittman, w/ a bit of Chillwave enabled haze thrown in. but beyond the admittedly quite cool sound design the compositions seem to me a bit generic at times, I don't get how it "BURIES the competition". i do like the track "Hubble" a lot

he's a good dj btw, plays loads of Flyte Tyme and New Jack Swing and 90s house and stuff

a lot of the writing about this album concentrates on this "r&b concrete" angle as if "disembodied vocal samples" are somehow this new groundbreaking technique of modern electronic music production, when in actuality it is about the most cliched. hasn't Todd Edwards been "disembodying" rnb vocals since like, 1994?

u do sound like a h8r and not a very interesting one

have heard first two of those and it's not a close relaish

i wouldn't make claims for splazsh being hugely innovative

u misunderstood a ref to another hyped south london producah who might get called 'r&b concrete' ;_;

how many tracks on this have "disembodied vocal samples" and how do u discern between those and common or garden vocal samples

no need to get defensive, though if it helps boost your ILX status by all means. next step "sock master" amirite?

if anything i'm just trying to work out why this leaves me cold when I love so much of the stuff it cribs from. I guess you missed the part where I praised the sound design and mentioned that I like the track "Hubble" a lot, while touching on his excellent dj skills?

and if you can't hear Hieroglpyhic Being in something like say "Bubble Buts And Equations" then I don't believe you've heard Hieroglyphic Being

havent we already had this convo about james blake, or is this diff somehow

^^

missing u know yr shit and have good taste but 'I can see how people who haven't heard Steve Poindexter and Musique Records and Hieroglyphic Being might find it groundbreaking' is the sort of pass/agg trainspotter drivel that's not rly conducive to good ilx

u will know i have not heard 'Hieroglyphic Being' cuz he is third in yr list and i 'have heard first two of those '

idk about james blake, don't rly care/rate/etc him

there's some talk of actress in one of the rolling dance threads btw, moonship digs it iirc

no whiney weingarteno on this comment but really feel like most ppl that find this treatment of r&b interesting don't actually dig real r&b

this stuff is still pretty aight tho

don't rly care about r&b beyond the big singles yuh

i like music concrete tho

of course it doesn't sound a lot like the former, and the schematic owes little to the latter but yknow it kinda works as shorthand for what he's doing

not sure i get the (any) connection to musique concrete. it sounds like pleasantly spacey/funky idm to me. connect the dots?

"u will know i have not heard 'Hieroglyphic Being' cuz he is third in yr list and i 'have heard first two of those '"

ok well my point still stands, if you can't hear the influence Steve Poindexter's label, Muzique Records, has had on Actress's album Splazsh then etcetc

sorry if it's "pas/agg trainspotter drivel" to actually know my shit about the subject at hand, but when you say something like "this fuckin BURIES the competition" you shouldn't be surprised that somebody else might say, well actually, there's other stuff out there that already sounds like this and does it better

god yr slow

god yr butthurt?

i didn't come here to argue dude, I'll leave your thread be *waves*

tsccchhhh

entrylevs

oh ok, Burial reference, excellent. bravo old chap

still, I'm not so slow as to realize that "rnb concrete" is fucking lame

yeah its kinda a lame thread title trinket to get the spesh addled vagrants like yrself thru the door, all counts towards the admission stats tho

my sympathies, nakhchivan, for post-launch events itt

ikr

missing no just needs to chill a lil, i don't wanna scare off ppl who know more about techno than me

yeah apols for missing your pun. keep the ad homs coming though, you'll be reposted in zing thread in no time

Apparently Actress samples Youtube in his beats, tons of tightly edited low bitrate samples stacked layer upon layer.

It definitely seems like a reasonable comparison to the original Musique Concrete guys.

And I'm a big Hieroglyphic Being fan and don't feel that Actress is at all a bad comparison.

With Jamal its huge amounts material to dig through, with Actress: 2 minute long tracks.

Maybe the argument should be between brevity and long-windedness?

hmmm i don't really dig jamal moss very much and i don't think it's a great comparison unless you fixate on certain aspects of actress and the much better end of jamal moss.

the r&b-ish parts ("purple splazsh", "wrong potion") are the bits i like least. love love love the pleasantly spacy/funky IDM parts ("hubble", "bubble butts", "the kettle men"). i loathe the todd edwards influenced parts.

it didn't make my top 10, but it would've made #11 and if i made a list just on amount of time spent listening this would've been in the top 10.

i have hazyville but haven't really given it a listen ... what about his nonplus release? that was sick.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbSd7vgG-JA

^^ sounds more like urban tribe to me than burial or todd e

srsly off topic but jamal moss is 75% wack

as is being detroit/chicago nerd, as anyone who witnessed moonship: the early years will certainly attest to

:)

if i did, i would

Apparently Actress samples Youtube in his beats, tons of tightly edited low bitrate samples stacked layer upon layer.

It definitely seems like a reasonable comparison to the original Musique Concrete guys.

is this so? have heard this said of other producers, but not of cunningham. which may be to say, "i haven't done the research," but what's (not) done is done. and yeah, if true, that working process does make sense of the phrase/thread title. plus helps explain the pleasant fuzziness of the sound.

sounds pleasant but it's a little too clever isn't it, calling albums "hazyville" and stuff to bait the hauntology crew?

i just think he's best when he keeps it light, straightforward and beat oriented

I need to dig the album out again and give it another listen, shifted so much stuff around in my room I've got no idea where it is.

This is one of the few albums this year I felt compelled to own on vinyl.

And yeah, Jamal does have that Sun Ra quality control thing going on. When he's on he's definitely on.

Whereas all the Actress stuff I've heard was at least worth listening to more than once.

Hazyville included, some great shit on there.

i read the Youtube thing as well and it definitely goes to explain the graininess and warmth of the album -- kinda like an extreme update of the vintage sampler aliasing you hear on classic NY boom bap stuff

the Hieroglyphic Being/Muzique comparisons I only make with reference to Splazsh. it's that slightly unhinged, unpredictable approach to drum programming, wildly unquantized percussion patterns on top of straight 4x4 kicks, crunchy bass drums and hi hats that sizzle, and insanely unfathomable synth lines. he def has a more refined sense of melody and song structure that is his own, overall the album strikes me as an IDM dude's take on the abstract US house sound that's been popular over the past couple of years or so, that just so happens to fit in with the current chillwave/hypnagogic zeitgeist. despite not being crazy on the album, it's at least an interesting direction

basically though, I wanna hear more things like "Hubble" or "Paint, Straw and Bubbles", and less like "Senorita" or "Purple Splazsh"

yeah, excellent album. kinda glad it's not as emotionally intense as the last one.

he’s one of the best

the best. sounding great as always. can’t wait to give it a full listen.

Saw him back at the 2013 Brooklyn Electronic Music Festival at really sick venue that is no more. Was by far the best thing I saw there and was this incredible constantly evolving series of beats and atmosphere that had me thinking he was the closest I'd seen to an Autechre set by someone else.

Them playing together would be amazing! So sad I wasn't in Sydney in time for that show.

really makes the lo-fi/hi-fi distinction meaningless. neither annoyingly polished nor carelessly murky. also, unlike autechre, there's a distinct emotional core that unifies the music. it's also politicized without being didactic. what im saying is, it rocks

can't believe it's been almost 15 years since this thread was started. "r&b concrete" is still an alarmingly concise and accurate description.

How is it politicized?

probably my favorite musician of the decade. thick smoke always hanging in the air

― brimstead, Wednesday, 3 November 2021 17:30 (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

one of my faves of the century. new album roolz

it totally roolz. and the deluxe LP edition comes with an lp copy of 88!

Funny, this one didn't immediately strike me as much as previous albums, but I went back to it after reading the praise on this thread and it definitely clicked the second time, enough so that I immediately ordered the LP. I think headphones really helped me appreciate this album, and I'm not typically a headphones kind of person

love this new album and also his recent mix for Mixmag

i really love this album but it always leaves me wanting to listen to Motorbass

https://actress.bandcamp.com/album/statik

new album out june 7

this is great news, especially since I missed out on the limited-to-100 12" Boomkat had available for about five minutes before it sold out.

I eventually came around to LXXXVIII after initially finding it a little dull, but hoping this one hearkens back to the Honest Jon's era. Smalltown Supersound weirdly seems like a good fit, somehow. that ad copy is horrendous though

Enjoyed the RA mix, a collage of unreleased material. Some of it definitely feels like sketches or demos, but it's nice to hear how his mind works and the little things that give it that uncanny vibe.

Lol I think only he could get away with an accompanying interview that terse (fewer than 30 words).

new record is insane

pure awesome

like rip and ghettoville combined

whut??! don't tease

This is excellent, but also has it really taken this long for an IDM artist to release a track titled “Cafe del Mars”?

Listened to this last night. First one since R.I.P I loved immediately. How great is "Rainlines?"

beautiful stuff

i love that the bandcamp description calls it "celestial and ecstatic." i.e. makes you want to be high while you listen to it. i'm getting some 93-97 ae vibes here. "ray" sounds like it could be on amber.

Can't find it now but am sure I had an email from a clothing company about an Actress figurine, recently.

"celestial and ecstaticexpansive"

xp I saw the action figure via this instagram post

https://www.instagram.com/p/C76cdnDsTqC/?igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Liking this a lot on first listen. Getting the Ae vibes and, I'm not sure he'll ever be bucolic, but Cluster as well.

definitely

Idk if this album immediately strikes me as top tier Actress, but I am enjoying it. Lots of sounds from the RA mix arranged in a more fully realized form, but still pretty stripped back.

Makes me want to hear LXXXVIII again though

in addition to the always sublime fields of ambient mist with various leaves sputtering around, parts of this evoke whispery minimal stuff like giegling, dial, smallville, etc.. <3

this goes places

https://www.barbican.org.uk/our-story/press-room/barbican-announces-actress-x-suzanne-ciani-present-concrete-waves

" we walk together" from the new Transkript 1 is top notch

Totally missed the announcement for this one, thanks!

"baby u lar" really incredible, daring, excited to get to the rest of it

This EP feels like the perfect compressed encapsulation of Actress’s essential appeal across 4 tracks. Whether you like fucked up alien Actress or uneasy dancefloor Actress or eerie romance Actress, there’s something here for you

Actress's music falls into a personal category along with Oneohtrix Point Never, Flying Lotus and a few others where I'm not sure I fully get it. Like, it's not that I haven't enjoyed parts of his work in the past, but I struggle to understand what he's going for a lot of the time, as in, "What is the concept or idea here?".

Generally I like his tracks that work as soporific edge-of-sleep music that creates these strange grey bubbly clouds in my mind.

But other times I'll just be thinking "What is happening here beyond someone experimenting with a bunch of seemingly random samples arranged in no specific way? What is he going for?"

That said, this EP is pretty nice so far.

I sort of know what you mean. His songs/albums aren't like watching a movie from start to finish I guess. It's more like walking around a weird foggy warehouse/museum with a few things in it, also the building keeps disappearing or something. It's like he's invoking/deploying some arcane atmosphere/weather/electrical patterns and, just letting them kinda run like sleep hypnosis or something. It's total disassociation music for me. Extra-musically there is something really refreshing about how he will often just really hone in on only a few specific cool sounds per track. The audacity of it, the courage and the trust in one's vision and the belief in one's audience(?) to do it the way he does. L instead of.. watching a juggler or a movie or something. proto-backrooms, idk, this is all crap writing here

The patience of it

Yes I agree with that.

The best Actress tracks will zero in on a mood and then just sit in and with it, the effect of which is uncanny because of the slipperiness and inbetweenness of the moods he concocts - their liminal, transitional quality makes them feel unstable, like they should resolve into something else but they stubbornly refuse to.

It would be a bit like playing at a slow speed a video of someone's face changing from a frown to a smile (or vice versa), and then trying to mimic and maintain the appearance of a facial expression at the halfway point.

Or, I'm reminded of the story of how Kate Bush made the outro of "Leave It Open": she recorded herself singing "we let the weirdness in", then played that backwards, and then she tried to sing what the backwards recording sounded like, and then played that backwards, to create this kind of uncanny quasi-intelligibility.

yeah the sounds themselves are really sui generis to him and he has such a delicate tension with everything. i always loved this thread title because "rnb concrete" feels like it elegantly captures it. he's definitely making musique concrete on a certain level, the sounds qua sounds are all so sensitively arranged even when it feels like he's "jamming" or going with something based on intuition. i'm looking forward to hearing the new one.

Banger posts, all. Definitely affirms how I've come to understand his approach. It is ephemeral and tricky to pin down, but thinking of his music this way might help me appreciate it a bit more.

There is definitely a "dream logic" thing going on in his work that I like

Wonderful posts here. I fell HARD for all his records up to Ghettoville, and then kind of lost track of his post-hiatus stuff. This thread has made me really excited to connect with his more recent stuff.

Same, although I dutifully bought and played the more recent albums as they were released, so I can't really say I lost track as much as I lost interest. That's not to say that there isn't some great music on everything from AZD to Statik, just that I never really felt like returning to those records like I did with, say, RIP. Which I guess speaks to the vaporous and slippery qualities of the music some of you are referring to here. By the music's very nature, it doesn't always try so hard to stick, I guess?

I really liked this one, though, which would have been easy to miss:

https://www.discogs.com/release/32359812-Actress-%D0%94%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BD-%D0%94%D0%B6-%D0%9A%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%96%D0%BD%D0%B3%D0%B5%D0%BC

Listening to Дарен Дж. Каннінгем right now, wow, that is very good as well!

Yeah, it's solid. It didn't seem to get much attention at the time but I thought it was better than Statik

intrigued by the Suzanne Ciani collaboration, which turns out to be titled Concrete Waves