- This is some of Actress's most expansive, most beautiful and also simplest music yet.
- The best Actress productions shroud the listener in darkness. The English producer loves long, stately fade-ins. Tracks like "Marble Plexus" and "Dancing In The Smoke" seem to assemble themselves out of the mist, as if you've been asleep and suddenly regained consciousness in an unfamiliar and ominous place. His full-lengths play like dimly lit labyrinths filled with unseen threats, and he uses the major key sparingly, usually when he's trying to relieve the listener—as on "N.E.W," from the final stretch of his 2012 album R.I.P. His latest EP, Dummy Corporation, contains some of his shadowiest, most voluptuous music yet.
The main attraction on this 40-minute release—longer, if you count edits of two of the tracks at the end—is the title cut, clocking in at nearly 19 minutes of chord-drunk ambient house, carried along by a muffled kick drum and a faint pinprick of hi-hat. Distant muttering is sometimes audible deep in the mix, as is often the case in Moodymann's productions. "Dummy Corporation" plays much like that Detroit producer's epic "Runaway," not only in its marathon length but also in how it seems to envelop the listener. Dense chords cascade through the stereo field and form a cocoon that creates the illusion of closing off the track from the outside world. It's one of the most remarkable tracks Actress has ever released, at once an expansion and a distillation of his aesthetic.
The other three tracks are a mixed bag, less in quality than in sound and function. "Futur Spher Techno Version" continues in the atmospheric vein of "Dummy Corporation," with an eerie synth-bell lead that sounds just enough like Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" or the Halloween theme for horror-movie associations to take root. "Fragments Of A Butterfly's Face" is a war between two different basslines, one a distant sonar pulse, the other a low-end wobble redolent of early dubstep. "Dream" is a dancefloor killer with a screaming-eagle vocal sample and a nasty bass throb on the downbeats. These tracks are all great at what they do, but they don't really fit together as a trio. Dummy Corporation makes more sense on vinyl, where it's easier to understand Side A as Actress getting arty and Side B as a gift to DJs.
Dummy Corporation is so alluring that it's easy to miss how conventional this music is, at least by Actress's standards. The sound design on his earlier music, especially on 2010's Splazsh, could be gob-stopping. "Dummy Corporation," meanwhile, is an intelligent and uncommonly absorbing assembly of a handful of elements that've been put together in similar configurations many times by other producers, like Space Afrika on Somewhere Decent To Live or Will Long on his Long Trax series. There are no individual sounds here that are going to melt your mind. Dummy Corporation works more insidiously, slowly obscuring the outside world until it surrounds the listener like a cloud of fog.
Tracklist01. Dummy Corporation
02. Future Spher Techno Version
03. Fragments of a Butterfly's Face
04. Dream
05. Fragments of a Butterfly's Face (Edit)
06. Dream (Edit)