Somewhere on the internet, thanks to an elusive bootlegger known only as partyrockersish, there exists a mashup of quasi-parody act LMFAO’s definitive Party Rock Anthem with UK underground stalwart Actress’s Maze. It shouldn’t make sense. But the fact that this pinnacle of lowbrow dance music should mesh so seamlessly with the sparse, yet complex, Splazsh cut is perhaps testament to the methodical mastery of Darren J. Cunningham. Since that seminal album twelve years ago, Cunningham has established Actress as an essential name on the UK underground circuit, crafting ever evolving electronica that maps its influences carefully, but refuses to be bound by stylistic constraints. For Cunningham, that meant creeping ever more toward deconstruction as medium, creating loose, academic, and spatial beats that hang between ambient and dance. This is perhaps most true of 2020’s Karma & Desire, a record largely regarded as an opus for Actress. The interweaving of emotion, which for Cunnigham resulted in “a romantic tragedy set between the heavens and the underworld,” ushered in a new phase for Actress, and what we believed Cunningham to be capable of. In essence, he shifted the bar and set a new standard for himself.
Dummy Corporation, his latest EP and body of work since Karma & Desire, ctrl-alt-deletes the smokey, naturalistic ambiguity of Karma & Desire in favour of the synthetic. Here, Cunningham plays with loops and computerised phrases in an attempt to explore the process behind creating electronic music itself. “The overall idea is for this to be a demonstration of the process and the philosophical action art of creating modern day electronic music. I create these sketches, essentially like the fabrics, and I collage them together,” Cunningham has shared about the EP. It’s a lofty rationale at best. One that attempts to justify what is otherwise a collection of clubby experiments as something far more scholarly in approach. The framing of Dummy Corporation as a study on the act of creation itself doesn’t actually work in the EP’s favour. Nothing on here suggests insight into the process of the artist responsible for the ethereal, complex worlds of Splazsh or Karma & Desire. Perhaps because, in all honesty, Dummy Corporation is the least cerebral material Actress has ever put out. Even at its most sprawling and outwardly ambiguous, in this case the EP’s nineteen minute long title track, Dummy Corporation is quite accessible. This may be due in part to Cunnigham’s choice to work with loops here, the repetition of phrases and ideas accounting for much of the music’s overall substance.
Download and stream Dummy Corporation here
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Dream, for instance, sees Cunningham surrender to the power of techno’s repetitive structure rather than succumb to reinventing it. He produces a hypnotic, Floorplanesque stomper that stands as one of Actress’s best dancefloor moments to date. In fact, it’s when Cunningham tries to do too much that Dummy Corporation falters. Fragments Of A Butterfly’s Face decays a deep house loop to austere and skeletal lo-fi, its percussion muted, hi-hats forward, and bass submerged. Looped over nearly seven minutes, the promise of a full bodied, illustrious house track beneath the washes of decay becomes frustrating, and you find yourself craving more than the rudimentary elements Cunningham hones in on. This and Futur Spher Techno Version aim for the compelling distortion of Cunningham’s collaboration with Kai Campos, AZD Surf, but mostly lack the kinetic impulses of that single to stay engaging until the end. If anything, Dummy Corporation is a peak at the playful side of Actress; less serious, less ambiguous, more open to the potential failures of improvisation. Yet, the EP is presented as the opposite. To call this a thesis of sorts into the creative process behind creating what for Cunningham, is arguably always deliberate, frames the whole picture incorrectly, skewing our view of what Dummy Corporation is actually trying to show us.
Listen to Dream from Dummy Corporation below.
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