Tag Archives: Actress

New music – Actress: Radical Frame (Ninja Tune)

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posted by Ben Hogwood, with text from the album’s Bandcamp page.

Darren Cunningham, the man behind Actress, has a compelling musical presence – one that makes his new album Radical Frame an essential listen. Returning to a more spiritual, deeper house music in the form of early Matthew Herbert, Cunningham has made an album of intriguing contrasts, short snippets juxtaposed with sprawling, piano-led house epics.

The text accompanying the album goes deeper: “The idea of the black avant-garde exists, as it were, oxymoronically – as if black, on the one hand, and avant-garde, on the other hand, each depends for its coherence on the exclusion of the other. Now this is probably an overstatement of the case. Yet it’s all but justified by a vast interdisciplinary text representative not only of a problematically positivist conclusion that the avant-garde has been exclusively Euro-American, but of a deeper, perhaps unconscious, formulation of the avant-garde as necessarily not black. Part of what I’m after now is this: an assertion that the avant-garde is a black thing.”- Fred Moten

When we go searching for a Black avant-garde, we have to be prepared to look in unexpected places. The route to a Black avant-garde involves walking down – what some might consider – peculiar highways. Where they see strangeness, a road leading them nowhere, we see nothing but beauty. The paths Darren Cunningham went down, the highways he took to make Actress, are a chapter in the story of the Black avant-garde. Cunningham the footballer. Cunningham the Wulfrunian. Cunningham the ex-footballer. Cunningham the DJ. Cunningham the Londoner. Cunningham the producer. Cunningham the painter. Cunningham the writer. Cunningham the composer. This is where the Black avant-garde in Britain is made. This is where you have to go to find it.

Across an expansive discography of more than ten LPs, Actress has created his own arcane language of hermetic references and inter-dimensional electronic composition.

Radical Frame arrives 18 years since debut album Hazyville, and it feels like an apotheosis. The image realised. We get the full gamut of Actress signatures. Short bursts of broken down music. Tiny sketches of zoomed-in sound. Refracted dance floor heat. And we get more. We get appearances from CASISDEAD on Live By You (another image, another mask) and Rainy Miller (another artist from the provinces, Preston).

Overchord, the centre of the album, is paired with its precursor Live By You. It arrives alongside a video by Anna van der Velde, featuring Cunningham trapped in a luxury prison of his own making, contained but not constrained.

Perhaps Radical Frame is a container for everything that Cunningham has built so far. A frame he is handing over to the next in line. The next artist to make their own way in the Black British avant-garde.”

Make sure you immerse yourself in this one! Radical Frame is out now on Ninja Tune.

Published post no.3,021 – Saturday 19 September 2026

New music – Actress: Statik (Smalltown Supersound)

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by Ben Hogwood

This is a tenth album for Actress – and something of a new departure for Darren Cunningham, the man behind the moniker. For Cunningham has produced a purely ambient album.

Smalltown Supersound describe the new album as being “imbued with a sense of freedom. And of stillness. The kind of stillness within artistic motion that arises via the deepest states of flow. Once ‘inside’ the Statik experience, listeners may well find themselves newly calm and meditative.”

Listen below, and see if that happens to you!

Published post no.2,202 – Friday 7 June 2024

In concert – Actress and the London Contemporary Orchestra at the Barbican

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Actress (above) and the London Contemporary Orchestra

Barbican Hall, London / Wednesday 10 February 2016

This intriguing collection of musical thought had three aims. The first was to draw on a long-held ambition of Darren Cunningham, to work with an orchestra under his Actress pseudonym, while the second and third celebrated – or rather illustrated – the ‘brutalist’ architecture of the Barbican and the data readings behind the LAGEOS (Laser Geodynamics) satellite. Into all of these blueprints, curated by Boiler Room, were fed the music of Actress – a potent blend of techno, soul and dark electronica that lends itself to classical structures and instruments. In new arrangements and pieces Actress and Hugh Brunt, conductor and co-Artistic Director of the London Contemporary Orchestra, found a meeting point of all these elements, presenting them to the Barbican with video artist Nic Hamilton.

They called the collision Momentum, a banner symbolised by a circular object that initially resembled a giant glitterball but was in fact the spacecraft used in the LAGEOS missions. In practice it rotated at a much slower pace, responding to Cunningham’s beats – if indeed there were beats at all.

momentum

There was an air of tension from the start of the performance, with a long period of silence before the music began. Even then it only gradually crept into the consciousness, and with the lights down low a feeling of forced ambience crept over the audience, restful but not relaxed in the way earlier Aphex Twin can work. Slowly Cunningham built through Lagos and Momentum, two new tracks, his set already clearly conceived on a larger scale.

Brunt’s arrangements for a string quartet of violin, viola, cello and double bass were striking, the instruments softly voiced to begin with but using a wide vibrato to make the centre of pitch far less certain. Oliver Coates’ cameo on a detuned cello was darkened by the use of a curious, semi-elliptical bow. The harp sprinkled planetary dust on the strings through the hands of Victoria Lester, while Hamilton’s astronomical backdrop helped create space in the closed environment.

As the audience began to fidget a breaking point was nearly reached, emphatically punctured by the volleys of Galya Beat, kick drums thrown from the pads of Sam Wilson’s machine. From here the music had greater power and caught the attention, the arrangements enhancing the beauty of Ascending, the harp and manipulated piano twinkling at the top of the sonic pile, while Piano Scrapes worked with subtle humour and more imaginative textures through the strings and the clarinet of Harry Cameron Parry.

Elsewhere Actress worked with claustrophobic backdrops, bringing the concrete maze of Hamilton’s Barbican video work to life. The strings provided essential colour to the largely grey backdrop of the thick but rather lush keyboards, themselves ambient but restless as before. The imaginative scoring included the creative use of a plastic bag in the percussion section.

Though it was a relatively small London Contemporary Orchestra on this occasion – much smaller than the forces used for Jonny Greenwood’s There Will Be Blood recently – it was used with imagination and flair by Cunningham and Brunt, the resulting music of substance and structure. Rather like the Barbican, in fact – together with a relative lack of pure emotion in the more calculated sections.

It would be great to see Actress flexing his muscles some more in the fascinating area in which he finds himself, bringing forms of music face to face with each other without anything sounding contrived. Future collaborations are surely inevitable; they are greatly anticipated!

Actress played: Lagos, Momentum, Galya Beat, Chaos Rain I-II, Ascending, Piano Scrapes, Surfer’s Hymn, Skygraff (Game Theory), N.E.W., Chasing Numbers, Voodoo, 5 Audio Track I-II, Hubble.

Names of Players:

Actress (electronics), London Contemporary Orchestra – Galya Bisengalieva (violin), Robert Ames (viola), Oliver Coates (cello), Dave Brown (double bass), Harry Cameron Penny (clarinet), Sam Wilson (percussion), Katherine Tinker (piano), Victoria Lester (harp)