THUMP Presents | Omar S/ Actress/ John FM at Output and Free Magic/ Faso/ Friends in The Panther Room

Detroit's Omar-S (Alex Omar Smith; aka DJ Snotburger, DJ Snotinburg) emerged in 2003 as an underground techno/house maverick, releasing rigidly funky productions, made with analog gear, on his FXHE label. Though his 12? releases were pressed in small quantities with handwritten labels (and with run-out etchings like "Techno music is my heritage — techno is not dead DAMN IT!" and "Thanks toRick Wilhite — I know I get on your nerves"), it wasn't long before his releases reached specialty shops in the U.K. and Germany. Though he was building a cult following and was often placed by writers within the same context as fellow Detroit natives Moodymann and Theo Parrish, it wasn't until 2009 that he truly strayed from his low-profile, self-sufficient mode. Parrish's Sound Signature label released his "Blown Valvetrane" 12?, and shortly after that, Smith provided the 45th mix for London club Fabric's self-named mix series. The majority of Smith's output was released on vinyl, but he also has full-length CD titles to his credit, including 2004?s Collaborating (billed as Oasis, co-produced by Smith and the possibly nonexistent Shadow Ray) and 2005?s Just Ask the Lonely. The latter was reissued on FXHE in 2009.


Actress isn't your regular techno producer, if you can call him that at all. The founder of Werk Discs has flitted between electro, hip-hop, house and techno over the past eight years, finding something close to a home in the smoke-filled recesses of some lost Underground Resistance bunker. He's an artist whose restless, unforgivingly manipulated music is just as suited to soundtracking installations as it is bellowing out into a nightclub. Part of the reason is Darren Cunningham's deceptive sense of atmospherics: though his tracks are often submerged, distorted and heavily filtered, there's an obsessive level of detail that seems to lead to dimensions of nuance unexpected from such a seemingly lo-fi surface. It's the reason why 2010?s Splazshwas one of that year's most addicting, fascinating albums, yet also one of its most monochrome and uniform. He's a defiantly individualistic voice in a referential musical climate, and even his most obvious influences are twisted into nearly unrecognizable binary code wreckage.

Whereas previous albums Splazsh and Hazyville were primarily oriented around beat-driven tracks that you might classify as techno or electro, R.I.P. looks deeply inward into a withdrawn universe, inhabiting some imagined catacombs between the rhythms of established genres. It's a pseudo-concept album about "gardens, serpents and mythological caves," and it has the careful sequencing of one too. Actress records have always been a bit of a journey, but it's never felt as literal as on R.I.P., which stumbles and fumbles through the dark, finding occasional pockets of light and life.

The record is ordered with remarkable care, starting off slow with the more ambient title track and "Ascending" before coalescing into something recognizably alive with "Marble Plexus." Burying a synth beneath blasts of fuzz-bass and shimmering hall-of-mirrors lightworks, its melody seems to squirm and convulse almost at random. "Plexus" makes for a reflection of the organic composition process of R.I.P, one that forewent software synthesizers and plugins in favour of a more hands-on approach. It's a tactile process that results in an album that feels like it's being improvised live, separate even from previous Actress work which could still feel quantized despite its short-circuiting wires and digitized shrieks.

The album's midsection drops out into its most challenging run of tracks. "Jardin" is an exploratory crawl through a completely foreign sound library. Drums sputter and splatter in attempt to map out some kind of pattern before falling back into the wet earth beneath with a plod. Things pick up slightly with "Serpent" and "Shadow From Tartarus," the latter like the mouldy remnants of electro emerging from the unseen depths.


Free Magic and Faso are the resident DJs of Discovery, a monthly club night in Brooklyn every second Saturday. Playing with the threads connecting House, Disco, and Techno, they set the mood for diverse headliners booked according to who’s records spends the most time in their record crates.Discovery Recordings provides a vinyl outlet for material from friends and their own studios.


Free Magic and Faso are the resident DJs of Discovery, a monthly club night in Brooklyn every second Saturday. Playing with the threads connecting House, Disco, and Techno, they set the mood for diverse headliners booked according to who's records spends the most time in their record crates.Discovery Recordings provides a vinyl outlet for material from friends and their own studios.