Actress, Splazsh [Honest Jon’s Records]
Discussing the quest for his own little corner of the electronic music landscape with The Wire, unabashed techno enthusiast Darren Cunningham spoke candidly on the anxiety of influence. "When you've got the Detroit shadow looming over you... you need to come with something quite decent. I took time to find what my sound was." Splazsh is the stunning realization of that effort, a richly introverted hour of modulated drones, stop-start rhythms and swung funk that distinguishes itself from forebears and contemporaries through what are, by now, Actress' calling-card idiosyncrasies: the raw rumble of blown-out bass, the overdone EQ-ing and, of course, the security-footage rendering of compression and distortion. These tricks coalesce in a hypnotic twinning of the ominous and euphoric, but it isn't sound design that made Splazsh one of 2010's major events. It's that Cunningham seems to be viewing music from a different vantage point than the rest of us. This is a guy who originally fancied 2009's "Ghosts Have A Heaven" a good fit for Underground Resistance, and who described "Hubble" as a study of Prince’s "Erotic City." His sophomore LP is every bit as eccentric, abstract and playful as we’d hoped to hear. Hopscotching from spectral haze to glassy R&B to nightvision garage to aggro glitch, Splazsh sometimes manages to roll and swing and swagger and coo all at once. But it puzzles and surprises us too, never quite fitting the hybridized genre tags we lob at it. We'll be listening closely to this one long after 2010 ends, clamoring for a glimpse of whatever it is that Darren Cunningham sees through his prismatic window to the world of rhythm music.
This review appeared in Little White Earbuds’ year-end Top 10 Albums of 2010 feature.