Wolverhampton’s Actress—Darren Cunningham on paperwork—has made plenty of conceptual electronic albums before, but his most captivating project yet isn’t one. You’d think albums—most full albums, anyway—Actress releases would be adorned with concepts, both big and small as he has made albums inspired by death and his belief in God (R.I.P.), by chrome (AZD), and by the game of Chess (LXXXVIII). However, since moving to his new record label home, Smalltown Supersound, Statik was revealed as an album made with pure unbridled creativity in the brain. Though, the deeper and more often you listen to Statik, the more a concept shows out anyway. Only this time, it isn’t as simple as picking the theme of chess, vocals, or mortality. This is baked within the experience of the album.
Statik sounds best listened to deep in the navy blue of midnight. That’s when the concept peaks out the loudest. Turn on “Hell,” let the music play, and allow the streetlit night you walk feel like its own place of desolation. It is an ambient soundtrack for a ghost town you may find spooky or serene in said emptiness. There’s distant hissing in the mix that sounds like the last train pulling in or the last bus looking to take somebody home with a looping of an ambient electric piano sample. The track also flips in vibe from a sparkling night over to a spooky one. Anonymous noises are chopped amongst lasers and a slow-motion rhythm sounds like a trap beat on hard drugs. Now, imagine what this would sound like emitting above the hiss of the nearly worn cassette tape in your Walkman.
The first half of the album’s opener “Hell” plays around with that dry vibe for a while before exploding into something abstract and chaotic—an ambiance Actress isn’t a stranger to. The imagined lonely reality exists throughout the entire first half to the middle end of the album. Add to this the title track, and such lonely feelings turn into something loud. After all, “Statik” feels like what would happen if heavy bombs fell around you, but you remain too locked into a sense of peace to hear or feel the carnage around you. Tranquil synths buried underneath artfully sculpted hiss and heavy bass drops recreate the feeling of being in the middle of something apocalyptic. There isn’t one song on Statik that doesn’t feel like you could lose yourself amongst the sound wherever you hear it.
The mood slightly lightens up with the devotional stomp of “Rainlines.” It stomps in time like a club song you heard last night that was lost to time, but the melody is made of how it feels to remember something faintly. Similarly, “My Ways” is a minute-and-a-half long track akin to a faint blur of a trap song with distant claps and chopped synth bells. Then “Ray” clicks like a family of crickets in the night as pads glide like a sky that hasn’t turned black enough, all sprinkled with popcorn new-age synths. The song slowly morphs into an icy four-on-the-floor shuffle. The tranquil feeling slowly turns spacious with the glassy synth pads of “Six.” These two songs are the sound of lifting yourself toward a vast, empty yet glowing sky. Following, the most expansive track “System Verse” blends orchestrated music with pulsating static rhythms, sounding like a continuous lift through the deep end of space.
From start to finish, Statik is composed almost like a real-time journey from a dark and heavy place to the stars, and such a journey offers brightness as an emotional payoff. As far as extracting the concept, will you meet these largely ambient songs in its own universe or will you use the music as a soundtrack to your moment in reality? Whatever the case, Statik keeps you occupied long after the static hiss fades away.
