Bleep

Miles away from the streets of Hazyville and across the North Sea, Actress stakes his claim in Oslo progressing with the next play in his grand masterplan: his milestone tenth album Statik is his first for Norwegian label Smalltown Supersound, diving deeper into the flow state initiated with his previous 2023 album. Emerging from the glacial focus of LXXXVIII’s elaborate chess metaphor, Statik matches the temperatures of Actress’s new home with frosted soundscapes transported via the sea in between.

The misty, silvery hiss of ‘Hell’ introduces us to the muted, inverted images of this world. Icicles and bubbling synths traipse beneath the lo-fi stream, before percussive teeth subtly tear the track apart, scrubbing the radio dial of a crashed car to sludgily shift the chords. ‘Static’ dissipates those chilly, technoid aerial movements into an idyllic yet hypnagogic seafoam wash, bursts of soft noise and heartbeat-thumping bass wobbles resonating throughout. Attempting to draw similarities is futile but to our ears this work sits neatly alongside meditative masters such as Wolfgang Voigt, Oneohtrix Point Never, Moritz Von Oswald and even the more cerebral introspective depths of Theo Parrish's catalogue.

Amidst maze-like piano notes, slow snow shuffles, and beats ticking through the ambient sizzle, Actress offers opalescent wisps of melody. The glistening pitter patter synths and subtle whistles of ‘Dolphin Spray’ strut alongside lowkey, frequency shifting beats, not unlike the susurrus of the ocean spray as boats sway in the seabreeze. Tough techno rhythms meanwhile bounce under a whispering downpour on ‘Rainlines’, glossed in a hazy glaze while tyres skid in the distance. Torpedoes laser and radars blip through the subaquatic rebounding bass of ‘System Verse’, and the glassy notes of ‘Doves Over Atlantis’ buoy in the frozen sea of static.

Just under a year from his last album, Actress shifts gears and sleds into shimmering soft palettes, a breathtaking masterpiece from an artist that keeps surpassing expectations.