Actress Essentials

Actress Essentials

If grave rubbings had a sonic equivalent, they might sound like Actress’ music. The London electronic musician, born Darren Cunningham in 1979, makes ghostly ambient techno in which all sharp edges have been worn away, leaving only smudged lines. His sound arrived fully formed on 2008’s Hazyville, where grime synths and garbled vocal samples swirled in a lo-fi fog; he plunged further into what he called “R&B concrète” on now-classic albums like 2010’s Splazsh and 2014’s Ghettoville. Actress’ time-stretched voices and bit-crushed glitches play up their chilly, digital qualities, but the music also has a distinctly analog warmth: Beats resemble dust-caked needles skating over scratched vinyl, and on 2018’s LAGEOS, Cunningham even worked with the London Contemporary Orchestra, pairing no-fi sound design with highly conceptual compositions.

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