Actress - R.I.P

Artist: Actress
Album: R.I.P
Label: Honest Jon's
Release Date: April 2012
Where I Got It: Purchased the instant it went up on Boomkat, in a moment of limited-pressing nerves. I even shelled out for tracked shipping. Panic ensued when it went on sale early at Honest Jon's and I had to wait.
Packaging: Nothing hugely special in the packaging, although the cover is kind of mysterious. It's pressed up nice on 2LP and sounds great like every Honest Jon's LP I've bought.

Thoughts:

A couple of years back (it feels longer, but time has a way of overwriting itself as you get older) I was writing (with @andrewryce, no less) for music onethirtybpm. We had a monthly column where we scarfed up 'future bass' singles and occasionally ventured into album reviews. When Splazsh was announced, I cajoled and quite probably even threatened Andrew to get my hands on it - Hazyville remains one of my favourite albums and I felt sure that what came next would be revelatory. The promo came at a time when the rising tide of white collar problems was drowning out the thrill of writing about new music. Overtime was clocking up and I was getting by on barely any sleep, coding all night and living attached to my iPod.

Into that void fell Splazsh and it quickly became my escape. When I put in my headphones and turned it up, I could fade the world to black and scuttle into the depths of its labyrinthine world. When I wrote about it originally, I said that when listening to it "passers-by turn into vague pencil sketches, scribbled outlines that recede into the mists, their faces reduced to monochrome crosshatch. The scenery becomes watercolor bleed, smears of colour soaking into paper before crumpling and blowing away like fallen leaves."

Yet in its wake, when I accepted there was room in my life for other music, I felt disillusioned. With music, since so much of it seemed like vaporware, dissolving into bitwise slurry during a single listen. Even more so with words: these clumsy, paltry things that now felt swollen and awkward in my hands. As hard as I tried, I couldn't nail down that feeling, that rush, that intoxication of barricading myself inside Splazsh, nestled in its dense, throbbing heart.

As it always does, music found its way back into my heart, particularly as I fell in thrall to the lure of vinyl. But words? I spurned them the way I'd turned my back on the god of my youth. I abandoned case and punctuation, shredded sentences into word salad and shied away from metaphor like it could

Yet here I am, two years later, taking the latest Actress album, R.I.P, out and placing it on the turntable, dropping the needle and sitting back to feel for handfuls of words again. I went back and forth for some time, trying to understand why I was doing this and the closest I can get is that I still want it to be a dialogue. Not with the creator of the art so much as the art itself. A sort of prayer, some way of parsing what music is and does for me. It may be through a glass darkly, but one day it could be face to face.

To the music itself then (how many paragraphs in is this? Score one for the corrupting influence of Pitchfork?): Splazsh always made me think of entropy and decay, the sound of some vast occult mechanism buried in a labyrinth under London slowly running down. In contrast, while R.I.P is as mysterious and aloof as its predecessor, it's lighter and more spacious, less earthbound. It's the sound of shadows and curved air. It feels like Splazsh has been dismantled, its mechanical frame torn away revealing the liquid, shimmering innards. Even a track like Marble Plexus, the closest approximation to techno on Side A, feels like it's lit from within.

It's Side B where the album really takes flight though, beginning with "Jardin" which sounds like nothing he's ever done before. It's fragile and almost painfully beautiful, built of glass shards and poison rain, darkness moving over the face of the water. From there, the album goes from strength to strength: there's the low-slung throb of "Shadow of Tartarus", the melody moving through it like a subterranean stream, and the glorious "Raven" which is like the shadow cast by the Model 500 mothership as it soars to the stars. And the best, for me, is the almighty "Caves of Paradise" built like a classic techno track but with second-hand organic parts. When I play it, it stops time and I want it to go forever. "N.E.W." is probably a close second, and right now the best way I can explain it is to say it's as beautiful as the second half of Before and After Science, these big cloudy chords that spiral and ascend until they break through the cloud cover and soar. It's not as reductive as a direct comparison to Eno would make it, because everything is filtered through that peculiarly Actress sensibility of obscurity and misdirection.

It's not that nobody else moves in this territory; parts of the album, especially the interstitial tracks such as the creaking, wooden tension of "Tree of Knowledge" are reminiscent of Svarte Greiner's Knive and there are other echoes of Wolfgang Voigt, Moritz von Oswald's M series and the ever-present spectres of Detroit, although only seen dimly through the rain under the light of the streetlamps. Yet it's the way Actress ties it all together, painting like Mondrian with his sliders and knobs, sculpting these sounds of shine and shadow, teaching his machines to creep in the night, to rise like the son of the morning and to inspire something akin to worship.

[/phew]

So, I love this. I'd like to recommend it to anyone, but I know most people don't like this sort of thing. It's abstract and odd and it feels like you have to sidle up to it to find your way inside. If you like music that's quite happy to exist out on the fringes and doesn't really give a fuck if you don't approach then it's worth giving this a try. At worst, you'll think it's a lot of noise and go back to something that orbits a planet closer to where you live. At best, you'll fall headlong and take refuge inside it from the world outside.

Rating: 5 stars. 10.0. Five big round vinyl records. BNM. #vurtrecommends. A needledrop style HARD 10. Whatever rating system you want to use, this sits at the top of it.