Actress’ tenth studio album, the celestial and expansive Statik, is released June 7th via Smalltown Supersound.

The collaboration between Darren Cunningham and the esteemed Oslo-based purveyors of elevated sonics evolved organically following Actress’ remix of a Carmen Villain cut for the 12” of her Only Love From Now On LP.

In this vein, the entire Statik project, from conception through creation and release, has been blessed with an almost unnatural ease. For Actress, who wrote the majority of his subtly majestic new record in an extensive flow state, the project serves as a cohesive testament to artistic liberation.

Resultantly, Cunningham’s new album is 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.

Of course, those well-versed in Actress’s works are well-travelled when it comes to fantastical flights of the mind. Transportive sonics that spark inner-voyages – whether through nocturnal cityscapes, or far above and beyond, through Saturn’s rings and past Pluto’s moons – are prime Cunningham terrain. Yet while Statik is unmistakably an Actress LP, it’s also distinctly aquatic and subtly primordial, and so offers his audience novel elemental atmospheres to flow through. Listening closely, influential visions of aqueous realms, such as the mythic Atlantis, and evocations of ancient ceremonies as well as flying birds (and, perhaps, humans) may reveal themselves.

No matter if Statik inspires you to soar above or below the horizon, Actress and Smalltown Supersound promise you a safe and transcendent journey. More

TRACKLISTING 2LP:

Side A
A1. Push Power ( a 1 )
A2. Hit That Spdiff ( b 8 )
A3. Azd Rain ( g 1 )

Side B
B1. Memory Haze ( c 1 )
B2. Game Over ( e 1 )
B3. Typewriter World ( c 8 )

Side C
C1. Its me ( g 8 )
C2. Chill ( h 2 )
C3. Green Blue Amnesia Magic Haze ( d 7 )

Side D
D1. Oway ( f 7 )
D2. M2 ( f 8 )
D3. Azifiziks ( d 8 )
D4. Pluto ( a 2 ) More

Vinyl only, 'black label' release in the run up to forthcoming album Ghettoville More

Between sleep and the void lies the electronic interzone of Actress. Following the noted 2010 album Splazsh (voted number one in The Wire magazine’s Top 50 Releases Of The Year) South London producer Darren Cunningham returns with a suite of electronic laments, tone structures and dreamtime rhythms which all carry his unmistakable fingerprint. R.I.P. comprises fifteen tracks painstakingly crafted by Cunningham in his London studio over recent years, with a conceptual arc taking in death, life, sleep and religion. “I'm just an instrument,” Cunningham avers. “I'm completely dead when I write.”
Right from the debut album Hazyville (Werk Discs), Actress’s music has carried deep tinges and pock marks of London's rave music heritage. But after the angular dynamics of Splazsh (Honest Jon’s), R.I.P. heads out into deep space. The rhythms and pulses are smudged or blurred, or are hinted at by their absence. 2-step garage is collided into gamelan, and freeform interludes explore microtonal spaces and imagined string instruments. The fifteen chapters of R.I.P. begin with Ascension and the Book of Genesis and play out through gardens, serpents and mythological caves. “When I feel I'm coming towards the end of the process I'll buy some books related to the theme. So I started Milton’s Paradise Lost, started to re-read Jamie James’s The Music Of The Spheres. I wanted the movements to make sense scene-wise and chronologically."“In places the album is meant to drift,” notes Cunningham. R.I.P. moves back and forth between space and rhythm, probing the “boundaries in and of rest and peace.” Appropriately for exploring the myths of Creation, the sounds Actress creates are completely sui generis. There are no soft synths or plug-ins, and instead he uses meticulous manual sound tinkering to create tones, tunings and textures. “It's like painting with button and sliders,” he describes. “Melting and dripping, seeping yourself liquid into the machinery.” The ghosted rhythms and free tunings of these tracks live in a parallel universe to the conventional rigours of the dancefloor. Unlike the sterile sound spaces rendered in so much laptop sound-product, these tracks carry traces of the endless mouse strokes that made them. You feel the sweat and sinew of handmade construction. “I can't explain how I made those tracks, it's just impossible,” he says. “I have a hard time comprehending it myself sometimes.” The album begins with the title track, a short tonal requiem for the dead, before drifting into another beatless meditation, the rippling minimalist structure of Ascending. Holy Water and Marble Plexus introduce rhythm, although these percussive tics could be equally sourced from sub-bass speaker stacks or marbles rolling around a bowl. Jardin and Serpent are origami-like constructions which orbit around what could be pizzicato strings or harps. Last-but-one is IWAAD, whose pulsing 4/4 rhythms and warm hits of low-end vibration hint at a return to the real. R.I.P. underlines Actress’s reputation as one of the most eloquent voices to emerge from the sub-bass nexus of London dance music. His intuitive and original grasp of beats, textures and rhythm puts him on a parallel path to dance music innovators such as Drexciya, T++, Aphex Twin, Burial and Basic Channel. But the way he engages with electronic sound from first principles, realising his own self-contained sonic worlds, hints at less obvious kinships outside the dance music fraternity, with pioneers of homebrewed sound experiments such as Cabaret Voltaire, Pan Sonic and Oval. It moves the body but the sounds also tap into to something more intangible inside you; you dance, but also “slip/drift into another realm, probably without even realising.”

More

Between sleep and the void lies the electronic interzone of Actress. Following the noted 2010 album Splazsh (voted number one in The Wire magazine’s Top 50 Releases Of The Year) South London producer Darren Cunningham returns with a suite of electronic laments, tone structures and dreamtime rhythms which all carry his unmistakable fingerprint. R.I.P. comprises fifteen tracks painstakingly crafted by Cunningham in his London studio over recent years, with a conceptual arc taking in death, life, sleep and religion. “I'm just an instrument,” Cunningham avers. “I'm completely dead when I write.”
Right from the debut album Hazyville (Werk Discs), Actress’s music has carried deep tinges and pock marks of London's rave music heritage. But after the angular dynamics of Splazsh (Honest Jon’s), R.I.P. heads out into deep space. The rhythms and pulses are smudged or blurred, or are hinted at by their absence. 2-step garage is collided into gamelan, and freeform interludes explore microtonal spaces and imagined string instruments. The fifteen chapters of R.I.P. begin with Ascension and the Book of Genesis and play out through gardens, serpents and mythological caves. “When I feel I'm coming towards the end of the process I'll buy some books related to the theme. So I started Milton’s Paradise Lost, started to re-read Jamie James’s The Music Of The Spheres. I wanted the movements to make sense scene-wise and chronologically."“In places the album is meant to drift,” notes Cunningham. R.I.P. moves back and forth between space and rhythm, probing the “boundaries in and of rest and peace.” Appropriately for exploring the myths of Creation, the sounds Actress creates are completely sui generis. There are no soft synths or plug-ins, and instead he uses meticulous manual sound tinkering to create tones, tunings and textures. “It's like painting with button and sliders,” he describes. “Melting and dripping, seeping yourself liquid into the machinery.” The ghosted rhythms and free tunings of these tracks live in a parallel universe to the conventional rigours of the dancefloor. Unlike the sterile sound spaces rendered in so much laptop sound-product, these tracks carry traces of the endless mouse strokes that made them. You feel the sweat and sinew of handmade construction. “I can't explain how I made those tracks, it's just impossible,” he says. “I have a hard time comprehending it myself sometimes.” The album begins with the title track, a short tonal requiem for the dead, before drifting into another beatless meditation, the rippling minimalist structure of Ascending. Holy Water and Marble Plexus introduce rhythm, although these percussive tics could be equally sourced from sub-bass speaker stacks or marbles rolling around a bowl. Jardin and Serpent are origami-like constructions which orbit around what could be pizzicato strings or harps. Last-but-one is IWAAD, whose pulsing 4/4 rhythms and warm hits of low-end vibration hint at a return to the real. R.I.P. underlines Actress’s reputation as one of the most eloquent voices to emerge from the sub-bass nexus of London dance music. His intuitive and original grasp of beats, textures and rhythm puts him on a parallel path to dance music innovators such as Drexciya, T++, Aphex Twin, Burial and Basic Channel. But the way he engages with electronic sound from first principles, realising his own self-contained sonic worlds, hints at less obvious kinships outside the dance music fraternity, with pioneers of homebrewed sound experiments such as Cabaret Voltaire, Pan Sonic and Oval. It moves the body but the sounds also tap into to something more intangible inside you; you dance, but also “slip/drift into another realm, probably without even realising.”

More

Two dazzling, out-there contributions from the inimitable Actress: an immersive, slashing thumper, ecstatic and convulsive, multi-layered and head-nodding, just about getting Mars on the radio; and a kind of unhinged marimba and thumb-piano variation, grubbing around manically in half-memories of African polyrhythm.

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With a sound that no one can quite touch, nor classify, it comes as little surprise that an outside-the-box artist like Actress would come into the path of Autonomic. The mastermind behind the cult-worshipped Werk Discs (whose roster includes enigmatic producers Lone, Lukid and Zomby), Actress took the electronic spectrum into another direction entirely last year with ‘Splazsh.’ Released on Damon Albarn’s imprint Honest Jons, ‘Splazsh’ brought dynamic Hypercolour to the insular greyness that his ‘Hazyville’ album captured so well. After his acclaimed debut on Nonplus+ in 2010 – the astral ‘Machine And Voice’ EP, the intriguing artist returns to the label with ‘Gershwin / HarrierA bonafide classic to sit in the ranks alongside Cybotron, in comes a typically allencompassing, textured four-on-the-floor stomper from Actress.
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The anonymous techno producer returns to Actress' label in June with a three-track 12". Moiré first surfaced on Darren Cunningham's Werkdiscs label in February last year with the Never Sleep EP, brandishing a muggy techno sound that had much in common with the output of the label's owner. Supposedly "the result of a lack of sleep" and "the obsessive expressions of a mind inspired by the city and the scene that has surrounded him for a long time", the EP was followed up by a further 12? on Rush Hour which was similarly inspired by subterranean London. FACT now report that the producer has been tapped up for another release by Werkdiscs, the three-track BBOY 202 release, which sees the producer "revisiting and reworking familiar sounds in a way to create something raw, immersive and driving". The 12" features two further tracks, "False", which draws "on the sampling aesthetic of hip-hop", supposedly driven "by the need to feel something faster", and "Window", reportedly a track which came from some late night experimentation with a Jupiter 8 synthesiser in a Hamburg synth studio. Those wishing to preview the 12? can watch the monochromatic Disguise-created video for the title track below. More

Vinyl only, 'black label' release in the run up to forthcoming album Ghettoville More

Moiré is the latest signing on Acrtress' Werkdiscs label. "Never Sleep" is the debut single and features singer Heidi Vogel who is known from her work with Tosca. Actress remix on flipside! More