The Guardian 80

The fifth album from one of electronic music’s most admired producers comes with a lot of high-concept baggage, but the music speaks for itself

Darren J Cunningham cuts an intriguing figure in dance music. He’s not the only former professional footballer to try his hand as a DJ, but the West Brom striker is presumably the first one to subsequently establish himself in the world of cerebral post-dubstep techno. His releases as Actress suggest an artist not at home to the idea of wearing one’s intelligence lightly: he seems to wear his like a hi-vis jacket, with trousers to match. He has made work inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost and Jamie James’ “anecdotal history of the symphony of science and its counterpoint, the wisdom of music”, The Music of the Spheres. 2014’s Ghettoville arrived accompanied by an epilogue poem: “Spitting flames behind a white wall of silence. The machines have turned to stone, data reads like an obituary to its user.”

For all the reviews that seem to take this stuff at face value – quoting Nietzsche and Heidegger at you and loftily referring to his work not as albums or singles but “audio communions” – there’s occasionally the sense that some of this might be emanating from a man with his tongue lodged in his cheek. In one of his rare interviews, he suggested his working practices amounted to “smoking a lot of weed and seeing what happens”, while tracks bearing names such as Shadow from Tartarus and Uriel’s Black Harp rub shoulders with the noticeably earthier-sounding Doggin’ and Supreme Cunnilingus.

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The first impression of the contents we have is the album’s cover. In front of a pitch black background there is a single human hand, but is it holding a life-size chrome hand. The eye is immediately drawn to the shiny hand, but what Cunningham is telling us is that throughout AZD there will be points of light shining in the gloom. When you start to listen to the record – its name is pronounced AZID – you realise that Cunningham has created 12 songs that mix abstract noise and complex synth noodling, while underpinning everything with a love of classic Detroit techno. This is abundantly clear on the second track ‘Untitled 7’. Cascading synths fall around us, while the bassline slowly builds tension for a few minutes until classic techno breakbeats explode, transforming ‘Untitled 7’ from a Vangelis homage to a love letter to Phuture, while never losing sight of his harrowing world view. ‘Fantasynth’ could be the most immediate track on the album. Following on from the ideas on ‘Untitled 7’, it wastes no time getting to the point, as its opening salvo of techno breakbeats is par for the course throughout its five minutes duration.

‘CYN’ is Cunningham’s take on city living, as it spells New York City in reverse. The juxtaposition of cut up organic vocal samples and hard electronic noises is one of AZD’s highlights. ‘Runner’ sounds like a chilling remix of New Order’s classic ‘Blue Monday’. All of the poppiness has been stripped away and all we are left with is a small section of its iconic bassline, while industrial noises and minimal synth loops fill in the gaps, making ‘Runner’ both claustrophobic and gregarious. This could very well be a metaphor for Actress. There is one hook to grab onto for dear life, while all around us swirls harrowing synths and wonky breakbeats. But it’s also incredibly enjoyable. Through this murky fug we are shown a world where harrowing things happen, but in the middle of it is a sublime beauty. Through the darkness there is a faint glimmer of iridescent light reflecting off something shiny. A chrome hand comes into view that, eventually, leads us to safety. ‘Faure in Chrome’ opens with a glorious string section. It’s fresh and the strings gently float above what sounds like an old 56k dial up modem that is being tortured. It’s abrasive, but there is an alluring beauty to it.

On AZD Actress has created an album that is full of analogue synths, reminiscent of electronic pioneers more out there and minimal workouts from the Seventies. These workouts are airy, but there is a level of complexity and claustrophobia makes them challenging and broody. However they contain glitchy and skittering techno breakbeats that keep them moving forward. And it’s this juxtaposition that makes this album a tour de force. As a body of work it is similar to the late Carl Crack’s almost forgotten debut album Black Ark. Like that album AZD feels like a living soundscape full of inventive arrangements, abstract sojourns, techno flourishes and a splash of musique concrete. AZD is an album you have to digest in full rather than dipping in and out. If you put in the effort this is one of the most rewarding albums of the year so far, but like pronouncing its title, don’t be surprised if you don’t get it first time.

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Several regional dance music scenes feed into the work of Darren Cunningham, aka Actress. His singular, ever-evolving breed of experimental techno has precedents in Detroit, Chicago, and his native London, though none of these cities explain Cunningham. Rather, his music—which has grown conceptually weighty over his past few releases—imagines and perhaps even conjures another place, a new home for itself. In Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant Than the Sun, a collection of essays considering electronic music through an Afrofuturist lens, he writes “Everywhere, the ‘street’ is considered the ground and guarantee of all reality, a compulsory logic explaining all Black Music, conveniently mishearing antisocial surrealism as social realism.” The phrase “antisocial surrealism” is an excellent term for the broadly-drawn but inward-leaning world Actress creates.

On his last full-length, 2014’s Ghettoville, the place conjured was dusty and post-apocalyptic; the songs were intensely evocative, but also dragged under heavy bad-signal fuzz. That album’s press materials led many to believe it was Cunningham’s last release as Actress, but with AZD, he returns, though his persona has evolved. Its first single “X22RME” stoked hope that Cunningham might return to the project’s less abrasive, more club-oriented early sound, but it’s for the best that AZD (its title, pronounced “azid,” an anagram for Cunningham’s childhood nickname Daz) forges ahead on its intensely contemporary path.

While AZD moves between modes and styles, reaching deep into both Cunningham’s clubbiest and most avant-garde impulses, it maintains a clarity of vision. With the fuzz of Ghettoville dialed back a bit, the tracks’ skeletal structures come into relief: it’s generally easy to hear the distinct components of each and to meditate on the album’s juxtapositions. Actress’ plaintive music-box melodies and shuffling beats can loop unchanging for a pop song’s length. “UNTITLED 7” combines a tense synthesized-string passage with a sticky ascending bassline; halfway through, the strings are traded for hi-hats, a small change that relocates the track entirely. “FANTASYNTH” loops a liquid melody over the crunchy pulse of a beat, with some tinny, whirling sounds moving between.

The late New York artist and musician Rammellzee, sampled in “CYN,” looms over AZD. And his language-building (or language-deconstructing) projects seem a particularly useful point of reference. Rammellzee’s “Gothic Futurism” manifesto drew a link between medieval monks and graffiti artists, positing the latter as regaining some multi-dimensional power in the Roman alphabet that, he thought, had been previously quashed by the development of Western culture. Though Cunningham uses words sparingly, mostly in partially-lodged samples, he’s also concerned with the limiting and liberatory possibilities of language. If we think of the structure of a song as itself a vernacular language—guiding us, in the case of dance music, through the builds and drops of a track—Cunningham then develops his own forms, sinking us deep into a soundscape through relentless repetition, and overlaying that space with alternate ideas so that we’re stretched in a few directions at once.

Cunningham’s structures also disintegrate, and those moments of collapse are key. One of AZD’s stated themes is chrome, that highly reflective plating that has intense black-and-white contrasts. Little about this album is aesthetically crisp. Cunningham’s deliberate use of hiss gives the lovely impression that parts of these tracks are playing through an old car stereo—and, more broadly, contributes a sense of space outside of the neutral confines of the club. But when tracks come undone, it’s precipitated by metallic elements breaking apart. “DANCING IN THE SMOKE” maintains a churning pace, a sampled voice instructing or observing: “Dance, hear my record spin.” As another vocal sample interjects to repeat the phrase “the future,” sharp atonal accents pierce through aimlessly. This leads into “FAURE IN CHROME,” which came out of his collaboration with the London Contemporary Orchestra earlier this year. Passages from Romantic composer Gabriel Fauré’s “Requiem” are interlaid with glitchy squeals, which erode the melancholic tones to reveal new frequencies below.

But for all its artfully-deployed discordance, AZD maintains a musicality that holds the listener close. Sometimes this comes through in more danceable techno moments, like the single “X22RME” or the 80s-leaning synth-driven track “RUNNER,”; elsewhere, it’s in the emotive minimalist breaks of “FALLING RIZLAS” or “THERE'S AN ANGEL IN THE SHOWER.” Cunningham participates in a futurist tradition, following an arc set by artists and writers like Rammellzee and Eshun. But that futurism isn’t predictive, something yet to come; rather, his combination of science fictions, music histories, and socio-spatial realities feels deliriously adjacent to the world we’re listening to it in.

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Actress
AZD

[Ninja Tune; 2017]

Rating: 3.5/5

The Guardian 60

(Ninja Tune)

Banishing the spectre of retirement raised on 2014’s Ghettoville, Wolverhampton-born electronic producer Darren Cunningham returns with his Actress persona revamped and his sound reanimated by such typically high-flown inspirations as chrome, universal consciousness and the art of James Hampton. Rather than arcane and austere, though, his fifth album is by turns bleakly beautiful and playfully rampant: X22REME’s fast and funky techno disports itself with snorting minotaur synths and a deep discussion about meaning, while Dancing in the Smoke builds from dark, dubsteppy atmospherics through an itchy, tense rhythm to what sounds like a galactic synth battle. Runner, meanwhile, offers a spry re-soundtracking of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, with its cap also doffed to Blue Monday, while CYN fractures a sample of NYC hip-hop hero Rammellzee hypnotically through heavy synths and lurching machine rhythm, and Faure in Chrome metes out similar treatment to the composer’s Requiem. It all adds up to a deep, rewarding record from a musician with many roles left to play.