With album no. nine, Darren Cunningham manifests his status as a leading figure in experimental electronic music.
Darren Cunningham is one of the electronic musicians who, right from the start, have said goodbye to the club reference system from which they come. As an actress, he has been an exponent of an electronic avant-garde that stands above functionality and goes far beyond all genres for almost 20 years. The clearest reference was the 2018 album LAGEOS, on which he manipulated and deconstructed the sounds of the London Contemporary Orchestra. He then returned to the agenda with KARMA & DESIRE (2020) and the EP “Dummy Corporation” (2022).
The pre-release single “Push Power (a1)”, a kind of downtempo house track, is misleading; the majority of the tracks on the ninth album LXXXVII simply don’t have a straight beat. Actress sets a chess game to music on the album: a metaphor for the intellectual efforts that lead to the creation of these complex sound constructions. Actress takes elements from bass music, UK garage, dark ambient, and techno and collages them into dark gray, dystopian tracks that are trapped in a reverberated space.
They appear very different in their effect: “Azd Rain (g1)” sounds like acid house gone out of control, “Pluto (a2)” would look good on the main floor of Berghain, “Green Blue Amnesia Magic Haze (d7)” is a subsonic drone with music box accompaniment.