The producer known as ACTRESS and his r&b concrète

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"

his edit of this on Thriller is cool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xceQvaDAl08

the r&b-ish parts ("purple splazsh", "wrong potion") are the bits i like least.

OTM ... if there was $$$ to be made from making techno tributes to Prince then everyone would have been doing it years ago.

re: hazyville, i like the hardcore references in "again the addiction"

and on "crushed", too!

this album is so good & not really r&b at all and i don't think people who don't really like r&b would ever mistake this with r&b. feel like the sounds on it are very tube-ey, i visualize a lot of the lines as orange neon lights, something really linear (yet obviously very contorted) about it. way better than james blake although i didn't get the bfd w/ that thread but i also don't know anything about dance music. i've listened to this album on drugs a lot

moonship what's your top 10

my top 10 favorite albums this year

moonship what are your top 10 favourite albums this year

top 10 albums

demdike stare - liberation through hearing
martyn - fabric 50
ben klock - berghain 04
emeralds - does it look like I'm here?
dBridge & instra:mental - fabriclive 50
flying lotus - cosmogramma
shackleton - fabric 55
shed - the traveller
madlib - medicine show volume 3
anthony shakir - frictionalism

top 10 singles

martyn - is this insanity (remixes)
mmm - nous sommes mmm
wax - 30003
eqd - 04
locussolus - gunship

and other than that it was all from 2009: 2562, martyn, peverelist, zomby, the rest of that crew, wax and eqd sides by shed, scion versions, levon vincent, t++, dettmann and klock, function stuff on sandwell, milton bradley, frozen border, etc etc it all sounded as relevant or more this year as it did last year, and generally much more than what i read about in a lot of other dance music year-end lists :-(

your top 10 is lookin more like a top 5

& thanks

actually i forgot some off of my top 10 list

2562 - demons
2562 - rear window
rustie - sunburst
joker - tron

what's your top 10, flopson?

no dance stuff or anything, and i have difficulty with albums so ten is kind of a stretch but i pretty much love all these

waka flocka flame - flockavelli
e-40 - revenue retrievin
earl sweatshirt - earl
gucci mane - mr zone 6/jewelry selection
nht boyz - power triangle

purling hiss - hissteria
pc worship - s/t lp and 7" on shdwply
pig - magnetic
sex church - 6 songs by sex church
drunkdriver - s/t

this demdike stare is awesome

this didn't leave any impression on me the first couple of times i listened to it. i've been assured that it's a grower, tho not sure i care enough to find this out for myself. it's assuredly better than james blake tho.

missingNO: your mentioning of the "slightly unhinged, unpredictable approach to drum programming [&] wildly unquantized percussion patterns on top of straight 4x4 kicks" brings to mind how psyched I was to have learned about Terrence Dixon back in late '08 through Cunningham himself referring to him (along w/ a bunch of other better-known Detroiters, whose approaches I don't hear quite as strongly in Actress' work) as an influence on the 1-sheet blurb for "Hazyville".

Most of the T. Dixon/Population One stuff released on Metroplex and elsewhere that I've heard (from the mid-'90s to recent) has rhythmically really reminded me of Actress, in terms of the funky misalignments, etc.

(Anybody here into Downliners Sekt? A similar-enough aesthetic to warrant asking...)
http://boomkat.com/downloads/317164-downliners-sekt-hello-lonely-hold-the-nation
http://boomkat.com/downloads/367254-downliners-sekt-we-make-hits-not-the-public

Good to see Moonship's list there.

what's better

this - FWIW also **BUBBLING** just just outside the top 10, possibly nudging out dbridge or shackleton, FWIW also r&b concréte

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIPQqf4O9j8

or this - is this r&b concréte

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1fDsDsJsQg

downliners sekt have the right sound but the beats are chopped up a little OTT for my taste.

actress' 2010 top ten features steve poindexter @ #1
http://www.boomkat.com/charts.cfm?id=576&gID=11

Listening to this now. Not sure I get it - any of it. Tracks have been popping up on random for a while now and they've just sounded like awkward repeating patterns with little structure or development. So I've decided to listen to it as a whole. Don't hear any r'n'b whatsoever. I guess I will have to give it a couple of goes.

what's there to get? it's house music, man. we're hardly talking fucking xenakis here

I would call Actress neither house music nor easy to get to be honest.

yeah i dont really get it either, i thought it would be a grower...

It doesn't really become house music until at least the fourth track, and even then it's pretty abstract. Some tracks, that Bubble Butts one in particular, is just plain annoying. Again, I'll def give it another shot, because I've a feeling it's the kind of thing that clicks once heard in context and from then on you can't do without.

i particularly enjoy the stretch from "maze" through "let's fly," songs that fans of this type of thing never seem to mention.

― contenderizer, Wednesday, 29 December 2010 05:42 (1 month ago)

THIS, massively. Had forgotten how good 'Maze' is until putting it on again at the weekend.

I see he's on a bill with Demdike Stare and others in Bristol soon, that's hella tempting if I had any money at all.

I've been slowly getting into the Splazsh album. Works well on headphones.

Hazyville is good too, if a lot less evolved.

Yeah, I heard and liked 'Hazyville' - relatively passively - when it came out, 'Splazsh' was a big evolution though. And it does keep rewarding. Both a grower and with some moments of great immediacy.

I'm gonna go to that Bristol show on Saturday I think

i like that he uses bits of cut up youtube vids or w/e, presumably just the audio but if u play mpeg videos in winamp 2.xx u get some chill ass noise so who knows

this is awful.

people don't know how to troll anymore

whither phil paterson

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