Actress – Radical Frame Review

Actress finds moments of unexpected tenderness in Radical Frame’s restless electronics, though its experiments can frustrate as often as they intrigue.

Stalking the twilight world of electronic music’s liminal spaces, Actress is an artist who seems to delight in wrongfooting listeners, never quite giving them what they expect. Whether it’s releasing a 50-minute mix of new material as one extended track under a title in Cyrillic script, or dropping two hours’ worth of live improvised performances with synth pioneer Suzanne Ciani as a double album earlier this year, Actress has just as much disregard for musical format as he does musical form.

Radical Frame continues that pattern of unpredictability, and what’s immediately apparent on approaching the record is its unusual structure. Opening track ‘The Experiment’ is a 12-second snippet: a female voice flung through a robotic filter intoning the eponymous phrase. This is followed by an even shorter ‘track’, simply a muffled, stuttering voice demanding ‘gimme the fucking money man’. Like much in Actress’s world, you wonder if it’s cryptic, an oblique reference, or just Cunningham having a laugh. Either way, you get the impression of an inside reference we’re not privy to.

This false start means the album doesn’t properly begin until ‘Live by You’, featuring CASISDEAD. He would seemingly be the perfect inhabitant of Actress’s grimy nocturnal world, but feels frustratingly underused here. A grim fable of urban misadventure is relayed over mournful, detuned piano, which quickly dissolves into noisy drill; CASISDEAD’s congested grumbles dissolve into digital chatter and high-pitched counter-snares overpower the mix. The second verse is barely intelligible through the static, something about a ‘nurse on the ward’, and I can’t help but wonder if these lyrics are being broadcast as a transmission from wherever our unfortunate protagonist ended up.

Almost the entire second half of Radical Frame’s runtime is taken up by ‘Sheets’, featuring Rainy Miller. A multidisciplinary artist, producer and lyricist from Preston, Miller feels like a suitable denizen of Actress’s greyscale soundscapes. The track unfolds across 16 minutes of widescreen electronics, with layered pads, chirruping synths and muted breakbeats pattering in the background. It’s an approach used to tremendous effect by Underworld. But instead of a euphoric sense of unstoppable forward momentum, Actress remains stubbornly in fourth gear; the pads are lush and expansive, but the beats are tinny and Miller’s voice is overly dominant. This creates a disorientating combination of space and claustrophobia, with everything muted, like an endless car journey along the rainy B-roads and dual carriageways of provincial Britain.

The piece climaxes with a powerful sense of hope, given voice by Miller’s word collage, seared onto Actress’s expansive canvas. What began as tortured introspection, ‘I overthink, Who am I, What have I become’, gives way to finding solace in the arms of another: ‘We can hold onto hope a little longer’. Even this is painful: ‘But you burn so bright my love it hurts to hold you close’. Such emotional candour, and the tender atmosphere that envelops the final segment of ‘Sheets’, feel like the freshest territory that Actress explores on Radical Frame.

Actress’s sonic signature is harder to isolate than, say, Burial’s or Four Tet’s. Maybe that’s because the sound he’s made his own is so subtle that it’s difficult to pin down what makes it so appealing. Whatever ink it’s written in, that signature can be found all over the four tracks at the core of the record. The velvety tones of a saloon-bar chanteuse beckon you into the sumptuous ‘Overchord’, like something from a David Lynch dream sequence, as luxurious piano chords unspool like sheets of silk before dissolving into a mirage. The vocal fragments into shards, and electronic bleeps intermingle with piano over a steady house kick drum which is almost apologetic in its simplicity.

‘Cosmo’ is a short but pleasant interlude that echoes early Black Dog and classic IDM with feathery synths, and sounds like it emerged from the same set-up used for the Concrete Waves gigs. ‘Withending’ is dominated by similarly rich piano, chopped vocals and steady house kicks, whereas ‘Paris’ is more experimental, with a stuttering beat but the same atmosphere of high-end minimalism.

Radical Frame tantalises by offering glimpses into an introspective creative mind, and serves as a reminder that the avant-garde exists at the margins and in the edgelands. But it frustrates in equal measure, sometimes burdened by the weight of its own self-reference, and I can’t help hearing Actress’s own words in Rainy Miller’s parched soliloquy: ‘I overthink…I overthought’.