- Actress has always been an ambiguous and exploratory endeavour for Darren Jordan Cunningham as his discography to date listens as a continual reach beyond the artist and their subseq uent hardware. After many a single and EP released via underground channels, Actress’ Hazyville launched a greater sensibility for procedure and texture, as Cunningham produced increasingly challenging and unique sounds: the mangled house of Ghettoville, the dystopian IDM of AZD and now amplifying the electro-acoustic processes from a performance in collaboration with the London Contemporary Orchestra for his latest release Lageos.
In February of 2016, Actress and the LCO performed together as part of a project brought together by Arts Councils, Record Labels and Boiler Room for a live augmentation of the classical avant garde. An EP of this performance was released under the very utilitarian title of Audio Track 5 Ep. Lageos is the full length follow up. It’s worth noting that the LCO are just as capable of being noisy as Actress, capturing the crumpled polymer sounds of plastic bags for Actress to manipulate, as well as covering some of his more well known tracks. These recordings were then sent to Actress to use as he wished.
It is a surprisingly balanced body of work. Who would have expected that two fringe actors could come together and create something that finds its way down the middle of your expectations instead of clunking it’s way to a contrived end like bumper bowling. Momentum may be the best example of how synthesis can finesse the edges of classical training, as relaxed breaths of bowed harmony are given a bed of noise and tickled with oscillating compliments. It expands and retracts out of fibrous fissures as beautifully as any utopian vision of the singularity will.
The collaborations tend to lull when they’re at their most obvious, and this may be my own expectations or my crazed desire to destroy that ruins them, but in cases such as Chasing Numbers and Surfer’s Hymn, the compositions tend to negate either Actress or the LCO. Don’t get me wrong, the pieces themselves are still engaging but they don’t raise the collaboration of seemingly disparate parts above the perceived possibilities, these pieces would be just as effective being performed or programmed solely by either body.
Ultimately, these projects are of great worth as they break down the high and low of creativity. If you were to get Sophie and a Julliard Chamber Orchestra or Matrixxman and Ryuichi Sakamoto together it would still breakdown any silly notion compartmentalized expression - You do you over there, we do our thing here. Lageos allows curiosity to flourish and possibly fail but the experiment fosters a closer relationship between the abstract and the physical, of escapism and shared-space and we’re all richer for it.
-Nicholas J. Rodwell.