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Actress (aka Darren J Cunningham) is a giant of electronic composition, a far-seeing philosopher-complicator whose explorations have prefigured and pioneered many of the great themes in the club since his acclaimed label debut Splazsh in 2010. Now 2024 marks the beginning of a new kosmische mood for his tenth album, and his first for Norwegian avantgarde label Smalltown Supersound. Over the sweep of Darren’s career he has not only created his own arcane language, filled with hermetic references and interdimensional techno and electro but he arrived at many of the currents of the last twenty years first; often pushing out the waves and ripples of influence in his wake; from reimaging Stockhausen to collaborating with an AI trained on his own music as far back as 2018. Actress’s first love growing up in the post-industrial Midlands was football. It was a career-ending injury that while he was playing in the West Bromwich Albion youth team that was music’s good fortune, forcing a change in professional trajectory. Drawn to visual art, his other favourite was clarinet, classical training that he would use later in his career. A devotee of Detroit techno and particularly, Derrick May, Carl Craig and Kevin Saunderson, Cunningham, had the good fortune to have a friend sell him a studio setup for £200. After moving to London, Actress funded his degree in Recording Arts with a grant from the Professional Footballers Association for young players whose careers had been finished by injury. The result was a complete submersion in the dance subcultures of the capital. Founding his own label Werk Discs for his debut album Hazyville, he emerged seemingly pushing back against demarking lines, never using a metronome or the grid within the work. Werk Discs had been spun out of a club night founded by Darren and friends. The label went on to release the most vital producers of the late 00s; Lone, Helena Hauff, Zomby, Lukid. Cunningham’s second album in 2010 Splazsh represented a breakthrough, topping The Wire’s Rewind Albums of the year list and later being added to Pitchfork’s Top 100 Albums of 2010s. Released on Honest Jon’s, a label jointly founded by Damon Albarn, Actress travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo to record a track for Albarn’s Kinshasa One Two album.

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