Actress's tenth hazed set of fractal dancefloor refractions is a spongy, sub-aquatic mass of Drexciyan electro, gusty balearic ambience, 8-bit digi-dub and eerie Nuno Canavarro-esque melodic mazes. Steeped in obscured mythology while beckoning a burnished cybernetic future, 'Statik' might be his most decisive, celestial statement yet.
Balancing a dense conceptual framework with real soundsystem weight ain’t easy - too much artspeak and the music inevitably loses its pulse, pay too much attention to club algebra and you end chained to the textbook, not free to pen a new chapter. But Darren Cunningham has maintained the equilibrium since his earliest experiments; born and raised in the industrial Midlands, he's long tapped into the area's eccentric lineage, looping his explorative narrative into the region's under-sung history of invention, humour and futurism. Like Goldie before him, Cunningham's been able to survey the wider world of experimental music and its accompanying theories and overlay that topography onto kinetic, clubwise cityscapes, leaving just enough negative space for his more esoteric messages. 'R.I.P.', for example, coughed psychedelic techno dust over John Milton's Biblical epic 'Paradise Lost', while last year's beguiling 'LXXXVIII' took its customised rhythmic flux from chess and game theory.
On his tenth album, Cunningham sounds as if he's exhaling slowly; he sounds free-er than he has in years, almost carelessly smudging languid, plastic synths into poetic, oily reflections of his own unique trajectory. The concept itself leaves far more to the imagination than usual: the cover is an uncanny greyscale image of a burned-out estate car, with a torn, island-shaped scrap on the flip. It's as if Cunningham is reconciling his lived reality with two decades of worldly experiences, dousing his brittle fuzz in warmer waters. Opening track 'Hell' is a slow, industrial burner, with time-stretched keys and deep, bluesy drones that swerve into slippery, over-saturated rhythmic punctuations and ghosted voices. It's as crumpled and battered as the lonely vehicle on the cover, interrupted by the blur of 'Static' and 'My Ways', a brief player piano interval that ferries us to the next act.
Thudding through a familiar downpour of crackle, 'Rainlines' offers a tidal shift, forecasting the rest of the album's humidity with its metronomic pulse and cautiously melancholy stabs. But it's 'Ray' that finds Cunningham hit his stride: vintage Actress laquered and glossed, an almost invisible kick and spectral echoes encircled by bleeps that draw a clear line through Detroit, Rochdale and Willenhall. 'Cafe del Mars' meanwhile is a blunted view of the stars from the Balearics, all pitch-wonked electronics and hollowed-out, deeper-than-deep Theo-like rhythmic fractals, and on 'Dolphin Spray', Cunningham bends digi-dub to his will, vaporising faint guitar twangs and 8-bit spirals into a haze of ferric hiss and undulating bass.
The tranquil sense of delight is offset by Cunningham's more pensive moments: he eases us out of 'Statik' with nervous, submerged mythology, washing nostalgic minor-key pads over grinding kicks on the translucent 'System Verse', and confronting us with stifled grandeur on 'Doves Over Atlantis', muddying piano flourishes with off-kilter orchestral synth blasts that hint at Drexciya's legacy without plotting the familiar course. It's virtuosic stuff, and never overworked - Cunningham sounds confident and limber, challenging our perception of his sound and his lineage by redrawing his signature strokes and subliming two decades of history into a kaleidoscopic mist of electrical energy and well-baked mysticism. His move to borderless Norwegian imprint Smalltown Supersound makes perfect sense - there's no genre here, just water under the bridge.
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Actress's tenth hazed set of fractal dancefloor refractions is a spongy, sub-aquatic mass of Drexciyan electro, gusty balearic ambience, 8-bit digi-dub and eerie Nuno Canavarro-esque melodic mazes. Steeped in obscured mythology while beckoning a burnished cybernetic future, 'Statik' might be his most decisive, celestial statement yet.
Balancing a dense conceptual framework with real soundsystem weight ain’t easy - too much artspeak and the music inevitably loses its pulse, pay too much attention to club algebra and you end chained to the textbook, not free to pen a new chapter. But Darren Cunningham has maintained the equilibrium since his earliest experiments; born and raised in the industrial Midlands, he's long tapped into the area's eccentric lineage, looping his explorative narrative into the region's under-sung history of invention, humour and futurism. Like Goldie before him, Cunningham's been able to survey the wider world of experimental music and its accompanying theories and overlay that topography onto kinetic, clubwise cityscapes, leaving just enough negative space for his more esoteric messages. 'R.I.P.', for example, coughed psychedelic techno dust over John Milton's Biblical epic 'Paradise Lost', while last year's beguiling 'LXXXVIII' took its customised rhythmic flux from chess and game theory.
On his tenth album, Cunningham sounds as if he's exhaling slowly; he sounds free-er than he has in years, almost carelessly smudging languid, plastic synths into poetic, oily reflections of his own unique trajectory. The concept itself leaves far more to the imagination than usual: the cover is an uncanny greyscale image of a burned-out estate car, with a torn, island-shaped scrap on the flip. It's as if Cunningham is reconciling his lived reality with two decades of worldly experiences, dousing his brittle fuzz in warmer waters. Opening track 'Hell' is a slow, industrial burner, with time-stretched keys and deep, bluesy drones that swerve into slippery, over-saturated rhythmic punctuations and ghosted voices. It's as crumpled and battered as the lonely vehicle on the cover, interrupted by the blur of 'Static' and 'My Ways', a brief player piano interval that ferries us to the next act.
Thudding through a familiar downpour of crackle, 'Rainlines' offers a tidal shift, forecasting the rest of the album's humidity with its metronomic pulse and cautiously melancholy stabs. But it's 'Ray' that finds Cunningham hit his stride: vintage Actress laquered and glossed, an almost invisible kick and spectral echoes encircled by bleeps that draw a clear line through Detroit, Rochdale and Willenhall. 'Cafe del Mars' meanwhile is a blunted view of the stars from the Balearics, all pitch-wonked electronics and hollowed-out, deeper-than-deep Theo-like rhythmic fractals, and on 'Dolphin Spray', Cunningham bends digi-dub to his will, vaporising faint guitar twangs and 8-bit spirals into a haze of ferric hiss and undulating bass.
The tranquil sense of delight is offset by Cunningham's more pensive moments: he eases us out of 'Statik' with nervous, submerged mythology, washing nostalgic minor-key pads over grinding kicks on the translucent 'System Verse', and confronting us with stifled grandeur on 'Doves Over Atlantis', muddying piano flourishes with off-kilter orchestral synth blasts that hint at Drexciya's legacy without plotting the familiar course. It's virtuosic stuff, and never overworked - Cunningham sounds confident and limber, challenging our perception of his sound and his lineage by redrawing his signature strokes and subliming two decades of history into a kaleidoscopic mist of electrical energy and well-baked mysticism. His move to borderless Norwegian imprint Smalltown Supersound makes perfect sense - there's no genre here, just water under the bridge.
Actress's tenth hazed set of fractal dancefloor refractions is a spongy, sub-aquatic mass of Drexciyan electro, gusty balearic ambience, 8-bit digi-dub and eerie Nuno Canavarro-esque melodic mazes. Steeped in obscured mythology while beckoning a burnished cybernetic future, 'Statik' might be his most decisive, celestial statement yet.
Balancing a dense conceptual framework with real soundsystem weight ain’t easy - too much artspeak and the music inevitably loses its pulse, pay too much attention to club algebra and you end chained to the textbook, not free to pen a new chapter. But Darren Cunningham has maintained the equilibrium since his earliest experiments; born and raised in the industrial Midlands, he's long tapped into the area's eccentric lineage, looping his explorative narrative into the region's under-sung history of invention, humour and futurism. Like Goldie before him, Cunningham's been able to survey the wider world of experimental music and its accompanying theories and overlay that topography onto kinetic, clubwise cityscapes, leaving just enough negative space for his more esoteric messages. 'R.I.P.', for example, coughed psychedelic techno dust over John Milton's Biblical epic 'Paradise Lost', while last year's beguiling 'LXXXVIII' took its customised rhythmic flux from chess and game theory.
On his tenth album, Cunningham sounds as if he's exhaling slowly; he sounds free-er than he has in years, almost carelessly smudging languid, plastic synths into poetic, oily reflections of his own unique trajectory. The concept itself leaves far more to the imagination than usual: the cover is an uncanny greyscale image of a burned-out estate car, with a torn, island-shaped scrap on the flip. It's as if Cunningham is reconciling his lived reality with two decades of worldly experiences, dousing his brittle fuzz in warmer waters. Opening track 'Hell' is a slow, industrial burner, with time-stretched keys and deep, bluesy drones that swerve into slippery, over-saturated rhythmic punctuations and ghosted voices. It's as crumpled and battered as the lonely vehicle on the cover, interrupted by the blur of 'Static' and 'My Ways', a brief player piano interval that ferries us to the next act.
Thudding through a familiar downpour of crackle, 'Rainlines' offers a tidal shift, forecasting the rest of the album's humidity with its metronomic pulse and cautiously melancholy stabs. But it's 'Ray' that finds Cunningham hit his stride: vintage Actress laquered and glossed, an almost invisible kick and spectral echoes encircled by bleeps that draw a clear line through Detroit, Rochdale and Willenhall. 'Cafe del Mars' meanwhile is a blunted view of the stars from the Balearics, all pitch-wonked electronics and hollowed-out, deeper-than-deep Theo-like rhythmic fractals, and on 'Dolphin Spray', Cunningham bends digi-dub to his will, vaporising faint guitar twangs and 8-bit spirals into a haze of ferric hiss and undulating bass.
The tranquil sense of delight is offset by Cunningham's more pensive moments: he eases us out of 'Statik' with nervous, submerged mythology, washing nostalgic minor-key pads over grinding kicks on the translucent 'System Verse', and confronting us with stifled grandeur on 'Doves Over Atlantis', muddying piano flourishes with off-kilter orchestral synth blasts that hint at Drexciya's legacy without plotting the familiar course. It's virtuosic stuff, and never overworked - Cunningham sounds confident and limber, challenging our perception of his sound and his lineage by redrawing his signature strokes and subliming two decades of history into a kaleidoscopic mist of electrical energy and well-baked mysticism. His move to borderless Norwegian imprint Smalltown Supersound makes perfect sense - there's no genre here, just water under the bridge.
Actress's tenth hazed set of fractal dancefloor refractions is a spongy, sub-aquatic mass of Drexciyan electro, gusty balearic ambience, 8-bit digi-dub and eerie Nuno Canavarro-esque melodic mazes. Steeped in obscured mythology while beckoning a burnished cybernetic future, 'Statik' might be his most decisive, celestial statement yet.
Balancing a dense conceptual framework with real soundsystem weight ain’t easy - too much artspeak and the music inevitably loses its pulse, pay too much attention to club algebra and you end chained to the textbook, not free to pen a new chapter. But Darren Cunningham has maintained the equilibrium since his earliest experiments; born and raised in the industrial Midlands, he's long tapped into the area's eccentric lineage, looping his explorative narrative into the region's under-sung history of invention, humour and futurism. Like Goldie before him, Cunningham's been able to survey the wider world of experimental music and its accompanying theories and overlay that topography onto kinetic, clubwise cityscapes, leaving just enough negative space for his more esoteric messages. 'R.I.P.', for example, coughed psychedelic techno dust over John Milton's Biblical epic 'Paradise Lost', while last year's beguiling 'LXXXVIII' took its customised rhythmic flux from chess and game theory.
On his tenth album, Cunningham sounds as if he's exhaling slowly; he sounds free-er than he has in years, almost carelessly smudging languid, plastic synths into poetic, oily reflections of his own unique trajectory. The concept itself leaves far more to the imagination than usual: the cover is an uncanny greyscale image of a burned-out estate car, with a torn, island-shaped scrap on the flip. It's as if Cunningham is reconciling his lived reality with two decades of worldly experiences, dousing his brittle fuzz in warmer waters. Opening track 'Hell' is a slow, industrial burner, with time-stretched keys and deep, bluesy drones that swerve into slippery, over-saturated rhythmic punctuations and ghosted voices. It's as crumpled and battered as the lonely vehicle on the cover, interrupted by the blur of 'Static' and 'My Ways', a brief player piano interval that ferries us to the next act.
Thudding through a familiar downpour of crackle, 'Rainlines' offers a tidal shift, forecasting the rest of the album's humidity with its metronomic pulse and cautiously melancholy stabs. But it's 'Ray' that finds Cunningham hit his stride: vintage Actress laquered and glossed, an almost invisible kick and spectral echoes encircled by bleeps that draw a clear line through Detroit, Rochdale and Willenhall. 'Cafe del Mars' meanwhile is a blunted view of the stars from the Balearics, all pitch-wonked electronics and hollowed-out, deeper-than-deep Theo-like rhythmic fractals, and on 'Dolphin Spray', Cunningham bends digi-dub to his will, vaporising faint guitar twangs and 8-bit spirals into a haze of ferric hiss and undulating bass.
The tranquil sense of delight is offset by Cunningham's more pensive moments: he eases us out of 'Statik' with nervous, submerged mythology, washing nostalgic minor-key pads over grinding kicks on the translucent 'System Verse', and confronting us with stifled grandeur on 'Doves Over Atlantis', muddying piano flourishes with off-kilter orchestral synth blasts that hint at Drexciya's legacy without plotting the familiar course. It's virtuosic stuff, and never overworked - Cunningham sounds confident and limber, challenging our perception of his sound and his lineage by redrawing his signature strokes and subliming two decades of history into a kaleidoscopic mist of electrical energy and well-baked mysticism. His move to borderless Norwegian imprint Smalltown Supersound makes perfect sense - there's no genre here, just water under the bridge.
Limited edition clear colour vinyl. Comes with a poster and a download of the album dropped to your account
Out of Stock
Actress's tenth hazed set of fractal dancefloor refractions is a spongy, sub-aquatic mass of Drexciyan electro, gusty balearic ambience, 8-bit digi-dub and eerie Nuno Canavarro-esque melodic mazes. Steeped in obscured mythology while beckoning a burnished cybernetic future, 'Statik' might be his most decisive, celestial statement yet.
Balancing a dense conceptual framework with real soundsystem weight ain’t easy - too much artspeak and the music inevitably loses its pulse, pay too much attention to club algebra and you end chained to the textbook, not free to pen a new chapter. But Darren Cunningham has maintained the equilibrium since his earliest experiments; born and raised in the industrial Midlands, he's long tapped into the area's eccentric lineage, looping his explorative narrative into the region's under-sung history of invention, humour and futurism. Like Goldie before him, Cunningham's been able to survey the wider world of experimental music and its accompanying theories and overlay that topography onto kinetic, clubwise cityscapes, leaving just enough negative space for his more esoteric messages. 'R.I.P.', for example, coughed psychedelic techno dust over John Milton's Biblical epic 'Paradise Lost', while last year's beguiling 'LXXXVIII' took its customised rhythmic flux from chess and game theory.
On his tenth album, Cunningham sounds as if he's exhaling slowly; he sounds free-er than he has in years, almost carelessly smudging languid, plastic synths into poetic, oily reflections of his own unique trajectory. The concept itself leaves far more to the imagination than usual: the cover is an uncanny greyscale image of a burned-out estate car, with a torn, island-shaped scrap on the flip. It's as if Cunningham is reconciling his lived reality with two decades of worldly experiences, dousing his brittle fuzz in warmer waters. Opening track 'Hell' is a slow, industrial burner, with time-stretched keys and deep, bluesy drones that swerve into slippery, over-saturated rhythmic punctuations and ghosted voices. It's as crumpled and battered as the lonely vehicle on the cover, interrupted by the blur of 'Static' and 'My Ways', a brief player piano interval that ferries us to the next act.
Thudding through a familiar downpour of crackle, 'Rainlines' offers a tidal shift, forecasting the rest of the album's humidity with its metronomic pulse and cautiously melancholy stabs. But it's 'Ray' that finds Cunningham hit his stride: vintage Actress laquered and glossed, an almost invisible kick and spectral echoes encircled by bleeps that draw a clear line through Detroit, Rochdale and Willenhall. 'Cafe del Mars' meanwhile is a blunted view of the stars from the Balearics, all pitch-wonked electronics and hollowed-out, deeper-than-deep Theo-like rhythmic fractals, and on 'Dolphin Spray', Cunningham bends digi-dub to his will, vaporising faint guitar twangs and 8-bit spirals into a haze of ferric hiss and undulating bass.
The tranquil sense of delight is offset by Cunningham's more pensive moments: he eases us out of 'Statik' with nervous, submerged mythology, washing nostalgic minor-key pads over grinding kicks on the translucent 'System Verse', and confronting us with stifled grandeur on 'Doves Over Atlantis', muddying piano flourishes with off-kilter orchestral synth blasts that hint at Drexciya's legacy without plotting the familiar course. It's virtuosic stuff, and never overworked - Cunningham sounds confident and limber, challenging our perception of his sound and his lineage by redrawing his signature strokes and subliming two decades of history into a kaleidoscopic mist of electrical energy and well-baked mysticism. His move to borderless Norwegian imprint Smalltown Supersound makes perfect sense - there's no genre here, just water under the bridge.
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Back in stock - Limited Edition Boomkat Exclusive White Vinyl, comes with a poster and a download of the album dropped to your account.
Actress's tenth hazed set of fractal dancefloor refractions is a spongy, sub-aquatic mass of Drexciyan electro, gusty balearic ambience, 8-bit digi-dub and eerie Nuno Canavarro-esque melodic mazes. Steeped in obscured mythology while beckoning a burnished cybernetic future, 'Statik' might be his most decisive, celestial statement yet.
Balancing a dense conceptual framework with real soundsystem weight ain’t easy - too much artspeak and the music inevitably loses its pulse, pay too much attention to club algebra and you end chained to the textbook, not free to pen a new chapter. But Darren Cunningham has maintained the equilibrium since his earliest experiments; born and raised in the industrial Midlands, he's long tapped into the area's eccentric lineage, looping his explorative narrative into the region's under-sung history of invention, humour and futurism. Like Goldie before him, Cunningham's been able to survey the wider world of experimental music and its accompanying theories and overlay that topography onto kinetic, clubwise cityscapes, leaving just enough negative space for his more esoteric messages. 'R.I.P.', for example, coughed psychedelic techno dust over John Milton's Biblical epic 'Paradise Lost', while last year's beguiling 'LXXXVIII' took its customised rhythmic flux from chess and game theory.
On his tenth album, Cunningham sounds as if he's exhaling slowly; he sounds free-er than he has in years, almost carelessly smudging languid, plastic synths into poetic, oily reflections of his own unique trajectory. The concept itself leaves far more to the imagination than usual: the cover is an uncanny greyscale image of a burned-out estate car, with a torn, island-shaped scrap on the flip. It's as if Cunningham is reconciling his lived reality with two decades of worldly experiences, dousing his brittle fuzz in warmer waters. Opening track 'Hell' is a slow, industrial burner, with time-stretched keys and deep, bluesy drones that swerve into slippery, over-saturated rhythmic punctuations and ghosted voices. It's as crumpled and battered as the lonely vehicle on the cover, interrupted by the blur of 'Static' and 'My Ways', a brief player piano interval that ferries us to the next act.
Thudding through a familiar downpour of crackle, 'Rainlines' offers a tidal shift, forecasting the rest of the album's humidity with its metronomic pulse and cautiously melancholy stabs. But it's 'Ray' that finds Cunningham hit his stride: vintage Actress laquered and glossed, an almost invisible kick and spectral echoes encircled by bleeps that draw a clear line through Detroit, Rochdale and Willenhall. 'Cafe del Mars' meanwhile is a blunted view of the stars from the Balearics, all pitch-wonked electronics and hollowed-out, deeper-than-deep Theo-like rhythmic fractals, and on 'Dolphin Spray', Cunningham bends digi-dub to his will, vaporising faint guitar twangs and 8-bit spirals into a haze of ferric hiss and undulating bass.
The tranquil sense of delight is offset by Cunningham's more pensive moments: he eases us out of 'Statik' with nervous, submerged mythology, washing nostalgic minor-key pads over grinding kicks on the translucent 'System Verse', and confronting us with stifled grandeur on 'Doves Over Atlantis', muddying piano flourishes with off-kilter orchestral synth blasts that hint at Drexciya's legacy without plotting the familiar course. It's virtuosic stuff, and never overworked - Cunningham sounds confident and limber, challenging our perception of his sound and his lineage by redrawing his signature strokes and subliming two decades of history into a kaleidoscopic mist of electrical energy and well-baked mysticism. His move to borderless Norwegian imprint Smalltown Supersound makes perfect sense - there's no genre here, just water under the bridge.
Exclusive photos by Ola Rindal only with CD booklet.
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Actress's tenth hazed set of fractal dancefloor refractions is a spongy, sub-aquatic mass of Drexciyan electro, gusty balearic ambience, 8-bit digi-dub and eerie Nuno Canavarro-esque melodic mazes. Steeped in obscured mythology while beckoning a burnished cybernetic future, 'Statik' might be his most decisive, celestial statement yet.
Balancing a dense conceptual framework with real soundsystem weight ain’t easy - too much artspeak and the music inevitably loses its pulse, pay too much attention to club algebra and you end chained to the textbook, not free to pen a new chapter. But Darren Cunningham has maintained the equilibrium since his earliest experiments; born and raised in the industrial Midlands, he's long tapped into the area's eccentric lineage, looping his explorative narrative into the region's under-sung history of invention, humour and futurism. Like Goldie before him, Cunningham's been able to survey the wider world of experimental music and its accompanying theories and overlay that topography onto kinetic, clubwise cityscapes, leaving just enough negative space for his more esoteric messages. 'R.I.P.', for example, coughed psychedelic techno dust over John Milton's Biblical epic 'Paradise Lost', while last year's beguiling 'LXXXVIII' took its customised rhythmic flux from chess and game theory.
On his tenth album, Cunningham sounds as if he's exhaling slowly; he sounds free-er than he has in years, almost carelessly smudging languid, plastic synths into poetic, oily reflections of his own unique trajectory. The concept itself leaves far more to the imagination than usual: the cover is an uncanny greyscale image of a burned-out estate car, with a torn, island-shaped scrap on the flip. It's as if Cunningham is reconciling his lived reality with two decades of worldly experiences, dousing his brittle fuzz in warmer waters. Opening track 'Hell' is a slow, industrial burner, with time-stretched keys and deep, bluesy drones that swerve into slippery, over-saturated rhythmic punctuations and ghosted voices. It's as crumpled and battered as the lonely vehicle on the cover, interrupted by the blur of 'Static' and 'My Ways', a brief player piano interval that ferries us to the next act.
Thudding through a familiar downpour of crackle, 'Rainlines' offers a tidal shift, forecasting the rest of the album's humidity with its metronomic pulse and cautiously melancholy stabs. But it's 'Ray' that finds Cunningham hit his stride: vintage Actress laquered and glossed, an almost invisible kick and spectral echoes encircled by bleeps that draw a clear line through Detroit, Rochdale and Willenhall. 'Cafe del Mars' meanwhile is a blunted view of the stars from the Balearics, all pitch-wonked electronics and hollowed-out, deeper-than-deep Theo-like rhythmic fractals, and on 'Dolphin Spray', Cunningham bends digi-dub to his will, vaporising faint guitar twangs and 8-bit spirals into a haze of ferric hiss and undulating bass.
The tranquil sense of delight is offset by Cunningham's more pensive moments: he eases us out of 'Statik' with nervous, submerged mythology, washing nostalgic minor-key pads over grinding kicks on the translucent 'System Verse', and confronting us with stifled grandeur on 'Doves Over Atlantis', muddying piano flourishes with off-kilter orchestral synth blasts that hint at Drexciya's legacy without plotting the familiar course. It's virtuosic stuff, and never overworked - Cunningham sounds confident and limber, challenging our perception of his sound and his lineage by redrawing his signature strokes and subliming two decades of history into a kaleidoscopic mist of electrical energy and well-baked mysticism. His move to borderless Norwegian imprint Smalltown Supersound makes perfect sense - there's no genre here, just water under the bridge.