Actress

Dummy Corporation

Genre: TECHNO / HOUSE

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WAV

Boomkat Product Review:

Instant classic Actress tackle; a masterful album reaffirming his role among UK electronic and rave music’s most important psychopomps and standard bearers, up there beside Autechre, Burial, Boards of Canada, The Caretaker or NWAQ with a distinguished knack for transportive atmosphere and world building.

One of our most engaging abstract storytellers, Actress supplies one of his finest yarns with ‘Dummy Corporation’, a sort of sci-fi saga that arcs from Detroit to London in an instrumental evocation of places and spaces spelt out in patented greyscale iridescent production. Marking 20 odd years since his first forays with Steve Goodman’s Hyperdub club events, which begat his own Werk Discs parties and label by 2002, Actress plays to the deep rooted and enduring influence of the Motor City more clearly than ever on this, his 7th LP proper.

Where previous trips featured upfront/processed vocals, those voices are reduced more to textural presence and inference in a subtler style here, alloyed with supple grooves that trade on a meta-physical, rather than overtly physical, manner of heads-down club pressure that proves you can seduce on the ‘floor. The formative spirits of the ’90s cast a long shadow over the album’s series of events, casting a misty eye/ear on the way Detroit’s post-industrial, hi-tech jazz romance came to prefigure and irrevocably inspire the UK’s urban centres and beyond, an ever more necessary reminder of the OG gear.

The title tune is hands-down one of Actress’ finest, a gloaming 18 min masterstroke of noirish Lynchian ambiguity and furtive technosoul that sets the tone for the LP’s subplots, vacillating 313/LDN bloodstreams in the hearty pulse of ‘Fragments of a Butterfly’s Face (edit)’, and with digits on the desk in ‘Dream (edit)’ that nimbly animate its Detroit throb with dubwise/concrète tekkerz. ‘Futur Spher Techno version’ is a divine piece of ambient techno edging on chamber music, and the fuller-bodied versions of the LP’s earlier works are thickened up, spread out for optimal immersion when primed by the album’s flow, with ‘Dream’ hingeing on that deeply mystic strain of Detroit practice that links Mills and Convextion to Chain Reaction, via NWAQ and London warehouse fantasies.

MP3 Release (6)