Urlaubshits

And so on to the final part of my end of year round-up – my album of the year. There was never any doubt for me what it was going to be; from the moment I heard it this album has been on constant rotation. This album is Actress’ Splazsh.

Actress – Get Ohn (Fairlight Mix)

Splazsh is an album of sketches. Tracks quite often finish with a lack of any real resolution; they flit from style to style as abruptly as the dial being turned on a radio, but it is never anything than totally cohesive. Ostensibly Splazsh is bass music, with influences from house, techno, dubstep, jungle, and R&B, but there’s much more to this album than bass. It’s an album of quite complex textures, rendered through a haze of quite digital compression, and although the undercurrent of Actress’s music is dark, black even, his music always shines with a phosphorescence which constantly negates the more shadowy tones. The reason that a lot of bass and dubstep has never really spoken to me is not just due to a lack of melody, but a lack of colour. Somehow Splazsh manages to be the perfect negotiation between these two opposing forces in dance music.

I recently saw Actress DJing at Nail the Cross, and to be honest my memory of the night is hazy to say the least, but I do remember that his selection of tunes was not what I expected. The main music I remember him playing was some old school Jungle, and Kraftwerk’s “The Model”, which I think are very insightful as to where a lot of the inspiration for his music comes from. There’s a very dark, brutal core to his sound, with rolling but quite severe beats, but there’s also a very gentle and melodic, yet machine-like quality to everything he does. And its the machine that seems the best point of reference when considering the structure of his work. The beats don’t just have a clockwork quality; in the clattering shuffle of “Get Ohn (Fairlight Mix)” you can almost hear the noise of industrial machinery. In “The Kettle Men” they have a severity that sound like some kind of machine press. The synths in “Let’s Fly” seem to breathe, but in a highly regulated way, quite like an artificial breathing apparatus.

Actress – The Kettle Men

This album is so alien, it’s almost impossible to believe that there was ever a human being behind it. It’s only the very tiny moments of space between the compositions that snatches of human vocal occasionally struggle to emerge from the confusion. Much has been said about how Burial’s Untrue is the most accurate meditation on the loneliness and isolation of London city life, and this still rings true, but for me Splazsh is analogous to Untrue; while Untrue displays the human side to isolation, Splazsh has become to me an expression of the isolation and confusion of technology. If Untrue was perfect night bus music, then Splazsh is the music of sitting on the bus and watching a dozen people all blindly connecting with the internet via their phones, struggling to express emotion in a world now totally connected.

But aside from being very good, Splazsh marks quite a significant personal moment for me; it was the moment that I first “got” bass music. It offered me a window into a type of music which had found fairly impenetrable until then, and when an artist has the power to totally change your perception of a type of music, then that is an artist to be treasured.