The producer known as ACTRESS and his r&b concrète

New 12" is excellent too

I dunno if the musique concrète comparisons are apt — it just seems like soulful house-influenced electronic with a fastidious approach to sounds. wonder what kind of soft/hardware he used

also thankful this doesn't have that annoying cod 90s R&B filtered-synth squiggle that you hear on like everything that gets called dubstep or post-ds

tho thankfully this isn't dubstep or post-dubstep

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.

― sistern, Wednesday, 29 December 2010 08:01 (2 months ago)

this, p much

Hubble has a very strange effect on my brain if I listen to it all the way through. It puts me in a sinister dreamlike trance that I can't quite describe, but have rarely experienced in music

Bubble Butts and Equations has been sticking in my head this week.

tho thankfully this isn't dubstep or post-dubstep

I didn't say it was!

and i didn't say you said it was!

i've stopped playing this so much but it definitely caught me for a while

i find a lot of his tracks fastidious....in a good way! they are uhm 'well architected'

was surprised my friend who's an autechre fiend thought this was "meh", it seems to me like Ae fans would appresh this

i like this stuff a lot

someone post your favorite one or two things of his that are on youtube cause i listened to this last year and thought it was awful but am willing to re-asses

dont know too much about your taste & there is a p wide range of stuff on the album ito danceability, experimentalness, minimalism. i like these tho

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcnRT-m9MYo&feature=BF&playnext=1&list=QL&index=1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivvzgXdf83w&feature=related
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r7blGL1F8I&feature=related

I liked that last one better than the other two but this shit just isn't for me I guess.

I like his logo/cover art tho!

http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x18/gr8080/41b7a5f8.jpg

Hubble has a very strange effect on my brain if I listen to it all the way through. It puts me in a sinister dreamlike trance that I can't quite describe, but have rarely experienced in music

― farielan chosder bout a chagh an i ballme trantuming (dog latin), Monday, March 21, 2011 2:42 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

it makes me sleepy

MAZE is what i wished the TR2N soundtrack sounded like

senorita has become my ipod rep from this album. so simple, but kind of addictive (and actually pretty!)

Jordan - yeah sleepy, but I think it once made me have an inverse parasomniac moment where I kinda fell asleep while walking around with headphones and started tripping out. It was heavy man.

the b side of the new single is great

Senorita contains an Aaliyah sample, right? Hubble is one of those songs that I can listen to on repeat for 2 hours. Shigeto's album Full Circle is a good companion to Splazsh. He also plays live drums in his sets which took me by surprise (Shigeto, not Actress).

If you love Actress like me then check out "Plastic World" by BNJMN on Rush Hour. It's like a lush, less austere Splazsh. http://phs.abstractdynamics.org/2011/03/two_albums_morphosis_bnjmn.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9_BO9Kr-zc

Agreed on the BNJMN comparison. In some ways they're very different; BNJMN has a much housier feel, closer to FaltyDL maybe, and definitely a good fit for Rush Hour. But the textural quality of their sound and their approach to compression definitely share some similarities.

Also, Andy Stott's forthcoming 2x12 on Modern Love has a very Actressy vibe, maybe crossed with Dettinger... Amazing stuff.

this is as good as anything's he's done

http://www.sendspace.com/file/1ky4su

some of this sounds cool on an actress tip

http://soundcloud.com/lukid/preview-of-spitting-bile-ep

Sounds good--nice turning-the dial/soundbite preview segues. I recall Lukid's "Boxing Club" 12" from last year sounding particularly great, too.

As far as Actress + Lukid = Thriller goes, I'm enjoying their brand-new Radiohead remix (v. similar to Actress' "Surfer's Hymn" Panda Bear remix from earlier this year):

http://soundcloud.com/radiohead/radiohead-give-up-the-ghost

much prefer actress to lukid

I fell for the thread title bait, but there's nothing even remotely concrete about any of the tracks I listened to???

explain

not saying this is my favourite titled thread but it has been painstakingly elaborated on upthread

it just sounds like synthesizers and drum machines. I didn't hear any "real" sounds or noises integrated into the work in any way. He might be sampling youtube videos or something, but the end result isn't any more "concrète" than any other music that has been made using a sampler since 1980.
xp

it has been painstakingly elaborated on upthread

not really. people were like "oh he samples stuff from youtube. ok, concrète. cool"

so you would say that a requirement for music concrete is the use of environmental sound?

the last single harrier attk and some of the tracks released on twitter are the most 'sonically adventurous' things he has done

well, I don't want to make any requirements or dredge up an obsolete 60-year-old debate on musique concrete vs. electronic music. I just don't hear anything in this music that makes me think "concrete" in any way. Every track seems to contain synthesizers. Now maybe those are actually samples of motors or something pitch-shifted and layered to sound like synth pads, but if the end result just sounds like plain-ol electronic music, I don't really see the point in labeling it "concrete."

xp

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

― Rockcrit from the Tuoms (nakhchivan), Wednesday, 29 December 2010 07:26 (7 months ago)

not saying u are a vagrant, obviously

well ithink a quick skim of the article on wikipedia will clear it up for you wk

it strikes me that you have a very narrow view of what is musique concrete that doesn't even hew to what even Pierre Schafer described as the basis of musique concrete

don't take it the wrong way, nothing personal, you just don't understand what musique concrete is and you have obviously not read and understood the thread

Thank you, come again

maybe you should learn a little more about musique concrete than what you're getting from a quick skim of wikipedia

well you might be interested to know that I have recently reread not one, not two, but THREE whole books about it

ugh plz somebody delete my posts in this thread fucking embarrassing shit ugh

i read in an interview that this dude was working as a foley artists before he made it in the techno game

and he records shit on a minidisc cuz of the low sample rate

Very late to this party as is my style, but a few thoughts after an initial 5-6 spins:

> "Hubble" is amazing, and quite unlike anything else I've heard. I can't remember if I read this somewhere or dreamt it (hopefully the latter), but I want to say that Actress called it "a study of 'Erotic City'"...

> The cut-up vocal tracks make me queasy, and it's a similar queasiness to seeing an unhealthily skinny girl walking really fast.

> I wish the album had more BASS throughout it; it sounds emaciated in parts, as if it had been gutted of bass rather than just built without bass as a foundation. This probably relates to my queasiness above.

> I do understand very much why so many people call this a grower and have given it many listens trying to "get it"... It's an almost painfully drawn-in-on-itself sounding record, a decisive statement of a very esoteric aesthetic; it almost feels as if its creator is autistic. I'm not sure if there's anything to "get," though, but I'm also not sure that matters.

Haha, I love this post, Clarke. Bit more Actress banter here: FACT's 20 albums for 2011 including the whole thing about Erotic City.

Andy Stott's recent album Passed Me By is operating in a similar vein, but with BASS

I like that Stott record; it's really solid. I think it's perhaps getting a little over-hyped in certain circles, but I enjoy it a lot. There's in immersiveness to it, however, that puts it in an entirely different ballpark than Actress for me. (Maybe that "immseriveness" is just bass!) Also, Actress's beats are sometimes skittery in a way Stott's aren't--not like drill-and-bass "wheeeee drum programming!" skittery, and not "purposefully degraded" skittery (like Burial's can feel... It's like a five-espressos skittery, as if he's playing his drum machines live (not quantized) but he can't stop shaking and twitching.