The producer known as ACTRESS and his r&b concrète

there is an early Warp feel to this in places that reminds me of listening to Sweet Exorcist when I was a kid. I can understand it not getting universal love, but I have a lot of time for Actress's thing.

It's been growing on me as well, since I wrote here earlier. Guess I had to listen to it in one long stretch, not the detailed listen, to appreciate it.

Texture has always been one of the primary concerns of Actress (aka Darren Cunningham), his music melding peculiar samples with decayed dancefloor sounds to create abstract, R&B concrète

https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2018/event/actress-london-contemporary-orchestra

tried this album a few times.
didn't really do much for me.
but its possible I was not in the right place for it.

that levantis "romantic psychology" record is flipin spiffy. a cold damp cave / ceremonial robes

ahh .. i should clarify, I meant the actress vs LCO album that's due out soon.

it's not so different from the new oneohtrix, but still has that more subdued/poised, soupy actress quality that I find makes it very listenable

ah man i LOVED the vs LCO single, looking forward to the album

wasn't really feeling AZD apart from "blue window", for some reason!

in the realm of 21st c. electronica even 'texture' doesn't seem adequate enough to describe the vibes actress is involved in.. it's more like "physicality" and "sensation".. really hard, high level lysergic interactions with textures and stuff.. idk ymmv

Someone ordered a London Contemporary Orchestra

Possibly while high

'Faure in Chrome' from AZD does a better job of incorporating orchestral textures than most of LAGEOS, I'm afraid.

revisiting splazsh today, jesus christ "hubble"

jesus christ the whole record really, i definitely loved it at the time but it's even better than i remembered, broken and perverse but also pretty straightforwardly funky and danceable, fractured techno swaddled in vast atmospheres + disintegrated vocal samples, and then at the end it gets kinda ugly and violent! love it

Actress rules. I'll never not look forward to new material by him.

def one of the best artists of the decade

Absolutely, total hero

yeah agree

i was disappointed by r.i.p at the time, idk, maybe bc of the absence of vocals and it being less apparently danceable, it felt like a collection of inwardly-turned idm fragments to me. i am discovering, to my regret, that this was an extremely surface-level reading!!! "raven" and "shadow from tartarus" and "caves of paradise" are amazing and i don't even know what "jardin" is

I like the description of it as "a twilight interzone between rest and wakefulness"

(from the Wire end of year 2012)

feels in retrospect like R.I.P was a peak along with Splazsh

although Hazyville, Ghettoville, and AZD were all pretty much equally amazing

R.I.P. and Ghettoville are both amazing

splazsh and ghettoville are my favorites

also he is an amazing DJ

This could either be something special or a complete mess:

https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/131511-actress-x-stockhausen-sin-x-ii-2019

ghettoville is my favorite, absolutely scraped out

feel like i could put any track from it on a mix with early godflesh and no one would blink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo0BniC5oco

New LP, Karma and Desire, coming out in October.

... combining titles of two of my favorite records by artists named "Pharoah(e)"!

His new album was supposed to come out last month. I wonder what happened.

AT LAST

https://thequietus.com/articles/28603-actress-new-album-88

I couldn't figure out the clue but I found a link to the unlocked album regardless

88 is out now. Ninja Tune will release Karma & Desire in October 2020.

oh now its obvious!

Heavy later BoC vibe a few minutes in.

Yeah, I'm really enjoying this so far.

This drifts along very nicely, I like the deep bass sound. BoC vibes is otm!

this is awesome

I agree!

To me it sounds extremely Flying Lotus, and also maybe like he got some Korg Volcas? The synth textures feel very familiar to me (and I use a lot of Volcas). Also its more like a 22 minute beat tape than an album, but none of these are bad things, I'm into it.

Although some of these beats wear out their welcome by the time they hit 2 min, as opposed to his murky & detailed tracks that feel like they could go on forever.

Actress is less sprawl-prone than FL. His tracks come across as self-enclosed, gnomic fragments ('hedgehogs', per Fr. Schlegel) more so than FL's comparatively maximalist approach. I'm also tempted to argue that Actress is paradoxically closer to the core Warp aesthetic than FL.

True, FlyLo packs a lot into his 2 min tracks.

On the plus side I'm currently listening to AZD again, what an album.

i hear shake shakir in the newest actress but shake has just generally been on my mind so idk

lol at the emails from actress with subject lines looking like straight up spam

anybody call the phone number?

i did there was some music
meh