Statik

Actress is still working at something like the peak of his powers, and there's never a wrong step on Statik—never an idea that falls flat, never a moment where Cunningham feels like he's compromising his sound rather than simply choosing to work in a smoother style on his latest whim.

That’s the surreal magic of Statik: pallid terror deceptively wrapped in an inviting soft-focus glow. If it’s not Cunningham’s best work, it may be his most quintessential, a true distillation of his ability to simultaneously attract and repulse.

Tunes such as "Rainlines," "Dolphin Spray," and the amusingly titled "Cafe del Mars" are among his prettiest and most straightforward, respectively, dealing out throbbing and knackered house, intimate dancehall, and vaporous techno. The few purely ambient pieces, highlighted by "Doves Over Atlantis," are almost as evocative.

The most appealing Actress record since Splazsh. [Aug 2024, p.29]

As Cunningham pans across the channels, his sound design strikes the ears and creates synaptic leaps that draw pull the listener’s focus. Many of constituents will be familiar to fans of Boards of Canada, Two Lone Swordsmen and Aphex Twin and if the early tracks of Statik sound more challenging in their discordances, you will feel borne along by the idiosyncratic juxtapositions Cunningham creates.

This is not a purely inert record, in the sense that it is still essentially rhythmic, its tracks built from an interplay of beats and circling melodic motifs. Instead, Statik more often brings to mind the approach Aphex Twin took circa the material on his first Selected Ambient Works collection – loops as unbroken circles, movement employed as a means of remaining in one place. [Jul 2024, p