At no point in his career spanning more than 20 years would it have been appropriate to regard Darren Cunningham, alias Actress, as a 100 per cent representative of any current musical trends. Even though the temptation has always been great. Because techno, house and post-dubstep are repeatedly cited as references alongside Stockhausen. In connection with his twelfth album, Radical Frame, the term ‘Black Avant-Garde’ is now being used for the first time. And there is no more apt categorisation.
In ‘Withending’ and ‘Paris’, deep house merges with piano motifs and cosmic effects. ‘Overchord’ evolves from a soul ballad into minimal glitch techno. There are hip-hop deconstructions, hauntological sequences, noisy interference and spoken-word contributions. On the second side of the LP, in the 16-minute track ‘Sheets’, Actress then demonstrates that hazy ambient music blends well with complex beat structures and spoken vocals (by Rainy Miller). Cunningham has certainly produced more concise albums than ‘Radical Frame’, but none so clearly showcases the diversity of his art and his ability to bring the most varied fragments and sound sequences into new contexts. It hardly needs emphasising any more, but it remains true: Actress is and remains one of the most important artists in contemporary electronic music.
