Actress (musician)


Darren J. Cunningham is a British electronic musician, best known under the pseudonym Actress. His music has been released by a variety of different recording labels, which most prominently include Ninja Tune, Honest Jon's Records, and Werkdiscs, a label he co-founded in 2004. His 2010 album Splazsh was named the best album of the year by UK magazine The Wire.

Biography

Growing up, Cunningham was a talented footballer, signing and playing for West Bromwich Albion until suffering an injury which derailed his career as a promising young talent. Cunningham’s first introduction to music came through Matthew Parsons; Cunningham’s friend who had a basic music studio set up in his student accommodation. When Parsons went travelling, Cunningham purchased Parson’s studio equipment for £200. When he first began making music, Cunningham did not use a metronome, a technique which Cunningham says has contributed to how his ‘style developed’. To fund his place on one of the first degree courses in Recording Arts, Cunningham signed up for a grant programme run by the PFA.
In 2004, Following his early experiences in music and his subsequent immersion into the London club scene, Actress founded the label Werk Discs. The label started as a club night and has gone on to discover and release music by widely-talked about artists such as Helena Hauff, disrupt, Zomby, and Cunningham’s own releases. During this early period of Cunningham’s career, he remixed various productions, write for the ‘seminal techno imprint Soma Records’ and ‘put out singles and EPs through Prime Numbers and Nonplus.’

Releases

Cunningham's debut album, Hazyville, was released originally by Werk Discs on 28 November 2008, and later under both Ninja Tune and Werk Discs in January 2014. Pop Matters described it as a ‘clear winner’ and it was retrospectively described as one of 2008's 'most slept-on electronic releases' the album was the first of Cunningham’s discography to be originally released by Werk Discs in collaboration with Ninja Tune.
Cunningham's second album Splazsh, released 8 June 2010, was placed on numerous publications' end-of-year lists, including Fact and Resident Advisor, placing 3rd and 4th respectively. On top of this, the album topped The Wire's "2010 Rewind" list. Additionally, the album was placed 91st on Pitchfork's "100 Best Albums of the Decade So Far". It was also his first album to be released by Honest Jon's, a British record label jointly founded by Damon Albarn as an offshoot of the Honest Jon’s Record shop. Actress later traveled to the Democratic Republic of The Congo alongside Albarn to record ‘Kinshasha One Two’, which was released a year later in 2011 as a benefit single for Oxfam’s work in Congo.
In March 2012, shortly before the release of his next album, Cunningham performed alongside Koreless and Lapalux as part of a Tate Modern exhibition dedicated to the work of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.
On 20 April 2012, two years after the release of Splazsh, R.I.P. was released. It was the second album of Cunningham’s to be released on the Honest Jon’s imprint. The album received 'Best New Album' from Pitchfork, and was placed third on The Wire's 2012 annual critics' poll. The album was notable for displaying a shift in the musical direction for Actress, and was described as almost feeling 'like another artist entirely' by Drowned In Sound, who also described it as 'the most fully realised, ambitious and rewarding project that Cunningham has yet put to record'.
Following this, Actress participated in ‘Alternative Perceptions’ at Tate Modern, a collaboration with Matthew Herbert and several other artists such as Moiré, Purple Ferdinand, Kate Tempest and Knit the City. The event took place on 22 September 2012. Cunningham went on to collaborate with choreographer Eddie Peake and visual artist Nic Hamilton in August 2013 for a collaborative multimedia performance at St John-at-Hackney. Titled 'A Shared Cultural Memory', the piece was ‘a night of unique audio-visual experiences in direct response to the architecture and atmosphere of the Church.’
Many thought Ghettoville, Cunningham's third album, to be his last, due to the cryptic press-release preceding the release of the project, in which Actress described the album as a ‘black tinted conclusion of the Actress image’, and signed the message off with ‘R.I.P. Music 2014’. The album was released collaboratively by both Cunningham’s own label, Werkdiscs, and Ninjatune, and went on to reach number 20 on the Billboard Chart's ‘Top Dance/Electronic albums’. It has been described as sitting ‘at the point of convergence for all of electronic music’s most cutting-edge sounds, incorporating pieces of them all and feeling out the unexpected ways they synchronize.' For Cunningham’s live performances of the album, Cunningham commissioned artists such as Riyo Nemeth, William Stein, and Nic Hamilton to create visual interpretations of each of the album’s tracks. William Stein’s visual interpretation of the album would be utilized for the album’s artwork.
On 14 April 2017 Actress released AZD, his fifth studio album, and his latest to date, to Universal Acclaim. The album was described by Thea Ballard, writing for pitchfork, as an album that explores 'Cunningham’s clubbiest and most avant-garde impulses, exploring language and Afrofuturism while maintaining a musicality that holds the listener close.' Resident Advisor opined that ‘Cunningham can once again produce mirage-like moment of beauty like nobody else’. The album entered the UK album charts at number 45, reaching number 3 on the UK Electronic iTunes Album Chart, number 5 on the US Electronic iTunes Album Chart, and number 6 on the German Electronic iTunes Album Charts.
In October 2017, Actress was invited by the British Arts Council to perform a multimedia interpretation of Reich’s ‘Different Trains’ to mark the 70th anniversary of Indian independence. Titled ‘Different trains 1947’, the performance was a collaborative piece between Actress, Jack Barnett, Indian music producer Sandunes, percussionist Jivraj Singh and vocalist Priya Purushothaman, and filmmakers/artists Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, who performed a new audiovisual composition in response to the events of 1947.
On 26 May 2018 Actress collaborated with the London Contemporary Orchestra, performing to a sold-out audience at the Barbican, London.
In 2018, the recordings of this performance were compiled and released as an album titled ‘LAGEOS’, described by The Guardian as formulating 'a new sonic palette that is in equal measures intriguing and unsettling.'
On 16th July 2020 Actress released an album titled "88" exclusively on Bandcamp. The record was uploaded as a 49 minute single and is protected on artist's website with the clue "fate and love" which foreshadows the release of another upcoming album - Karma and Desire. The release of 88 was announced on artist's Twitter a day before it became available to download for free.'

Discography

Albums