ACTRESS

GHETTOVILLE (Ninja Tune/Werkdiscs)

17/20

Darren Cunningham doesn’t make things easy. Each of his previous records as Actress – the onomatopoeic Hazyville, the bubbling jerk of Splaszh, R.I.P’s pointillist take on Milton – took weeks, months, to reveal themselves fully to the listener, required them to attempt to enter the same headspace the producer inhabits. Ghettoville, billed as the end of the Actress persona, is no different.

It’s an obtuse take on hard-edged, steely, abstract techno, a crushed, warped, broken-kneed crawl through the hinterlands of the outer reaches of IDM; a defiantly ugly album. Cunningham’s skill is to take this ugliness – an aesthetic of abjection – and make us, as listeners, reframe it, recontextualise it, noticing the moments of a spectrally perverse beauty that emerge from sites of disarray. The beauty comes, as it is wont to do, from juxtaposition. Take songs like Rims and Frontline for example: the former rides on a metallurgist’s approximation of a G-funk rhythm track, the latter is a Berghain banger that’s been left to rot for a few years. Both layer their percussive beds with the slightest of melodical hints; a seeping synth here, a mirage of dystopian-ambient waft there. The light coming through the cracks – in this case an energy saving 30W bulb attempting to illuminate the entirety of a long-abandoned abattoir – is what causes to you to keep the faith. Actress’s music has always beguiled, always refuted easy explanations, always negated the potentiality of it making itself too obvious. Luckily, it’s always been good enough to get away with that. Ghettoville is no exception: a slate-grey masterpiece.

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Words: Josh Baines