When Carmen Villain invited Actress to rework a song off her recent album Only Love From Now On, she sent the leftfield electronic musician stems for all the tracks on the record and told him to take his pick. No stranger to coloring outside the lines, Actress availed himself of the whole set, grabbing a bass sound here, a drum there, and swirling all his chosen bits together into a coolly repetitive, eight-minute snapshot of infinity.
He describes the result—called simply “Carmen Villain (Actress Remix)”—as his “impression of the album.” It’s a macro view of the Mexican-Norwegian musician’s aesthetic, like half-snowy fields glimpsed from an airplane—geometric shapes carved into a rippling expanse of muted color. It’s all familiar, even if you don’t recognize individual details; his chords have the same watery glow as hers, and his drums retain the spindly quality that make listening to the album feel like shuffling through dry leaves. Toward the end, there’s even a mournful snippet of either Villain’s woodwinds or her collaborator Arve Henriksen’s trumpet. At the same time, the remix could easily pass for an Actress original; the icy chimes and staticky drums are dead ringers for the telltale sounds of his own productions. The collision of the two artists’ signatures makes for a spellbinding mind meld.
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