vinylfanatics.com

**Actress - Splazsh**
★★★★☆

In the murky depths of South London's musical underground, where dubstep was beginning its inevitable march toward mainstream acceptance, Darren Cunningham was busy plotting something altogether more sinister. Operating under the alias Actress, the Wolverhampton-born producer had already been quietly subverting expectations with a handful of 12-inches that suggested techno's familiar 4/4 framework could be twisted into something far more unsettling. But nothing quite prepared the electronic music world for the full-length statement of intent that was 2010's *Splazsh*.

The album emerged from a period of intense creative ferment for Cunningham, who had spent the latter half of the 2000s absorbing influences from Detroit techno, UK garage, and the nascent dubstep scene while developing his own distinctly wonky aesthetic. His early releases on Werk Discs had already established him as an artist uninterested in dancefloor functionality, preferring instead to create what he termed "street music" – tracks that retained the DNA of club culture while existing in a parallel dimension where the rules of rhythm and melody had been comprehensively rewritten.

*Splazsh* opens with "Hubble," a track that immediately establishes the album's disorienting geography. What begins as a relatively straightforward techno pulse quickly becomes something far stranger, with percussion that seems to stutter and skip like a damaged hard drive attempting to process information it can't quite handle. It's a perfect introduction to Cunningham's world – one where the familiar becomes uncanny, where the ghost in the machine isn't just present but actively sabotaging the proceedings.

The album's genius lies in its ability to suggest conventional dance music structures while systematically undermining them. "Get Mothered" builds around what might once have been a garage rhythm, but here it's been stretched and compressed until it resembles something closer to a fever dream. The track's melodic elements drift in and out of focus like half-remembered fragments of songs heard through apartment walls, creating an atmosphere that's simultaneously nostalgic and deeply unsettling.

Perhaps the album's finest moment comes with "Always Human," a piece that manages to be both brutally mechanical and oddly touching. The track's central motif – a simple, almost childlike melody – is subjected to constant digital degradation, yet somehow maintains its emotional core. It's a perfect encapsulation of Cunningham's ability to find humanity within the machine, or perhaps to reveal the machine-like qualities inherent in human emotion.

"Lost" pushes the album's deconstructionist agenda to its logical extreme, presenting what sounds like the remnants of a once-coherent composition that's been subjected to some catastrophic digital accident. Yet there's method in this apparent madness – the track's fragmented rhythms and pitch-shifted vocal samples create a hypnotic pull that's undeniably compelling, even as it refuses to resolve into anything resembling traditional song structure.

The album's production aesthetic is crucial to its impact. Where much contemporary electronic music strives for crystal clarity, *Splazsh* revels in lo-fi degradation. Tracks sound as though they've been recorded through layers of analog distortion, compressed and decompressed until they exist in a permanent state of near-collapse. It's an approach that gives the album a distinctly physical presence – you can almost feel the weight of the machinery struggling to contain these unstable compositions.

*Splazsh* arrived at a crucial moment in electronic music's evolution, when the rigid categories that had defined the genre for decades were beginning to blur. Cunningham's refusal to conform to any established template helped pave the way for a new generation of producers uninterested in genre boundaries. The album's influence can be heard in everything from the deconstructed club music of artists like Actress protégé Klein to the industrial techno renaissance of recent years.

More than a decade after its release, *Splazsh* remains a singular achievement – an album that sounds like nothing that came before it and precious little that's followed. In an era when electronic music often feels constrained by its own conventions, Cunningham's vision of a world where the machines have developed their own alien logic feels more relevant than ever. It's music for the spaces between spaces, for the moments when familiar technology reveals its capacity for genuine strangeness. In other words, it's perfect music for our current moment of digital unease.