Actress
Respected London based producer Actress is a contemporary of artists like Burial, Kode 9 and Zomby yet has carved out a space that is sonically mid-Atlantic and somehow ethereally the sound of multicultural London. Today, not only will he finally make his long overdue debut live performance in the USA, he will also release his third album R.I.P. on respected West London label Honest Jons Records
R.I.P will drop almost exactly two years after Splazsh, his sophomore album that was also released by Honest Jons. Splazsh was a surprise underground hit worldwide with fans and critics alike, distinctly a sound and mental space all his own. Splazsh was rightly considered to be one of 2010’s best albums on both sides of the Atlantic.
Since then Actress has continued to prove himself as an imaginative outsider with otherworldly EPs on Honest Jons and NonPlus+ as well as contributions to album projects reshaping modern day African music.
R.I.P. comprises fifteen tracks painstakingly crafted by the producer in his London studio with a conceptual arc taking in death, life, sleep and religion. Actress explains, “I'm just an instrument, I'm completely dead when I write. When I feel I'm coming towards the end of the process I'll buy some books related to the theme. So I started Milton’s Paradise Lost, started to re-read Jamie James’s The Music Of The Spheres. I wanted the movements to make sense scene-wise and chronologically. It's like painting with button and sliders. Melting and dripping, seeping yourself liquid into the machinery.”
R.I.P. is sure to underline Actress’s reputation as one of the most eloquent voices to emerge from the sub-bass nexus of London dance music. His intuitive and original grasp of beats, textures and rhythm put him on a parallel path to dance music innovators such as Aphex Twin, Basic Channel and Drexciya. But the way he engages with electronic sound from first principles, realizing his own self-contained sonic worlds, hints at less obvious kinships outside the dance music fraternity, with pioneers of homebrewed sound experiments such as Cabaret Voltaire, Pan Sonic and Oval. It moves the body but the sounds also tap into omething more intangible inside you; you dance, but also “slip/drift into another realm, probably without even realizing.”
