Actress

Darren Cunningham, working chiefly under the alias Actress and through a string of short-lived alternate identities, has generated some of the most unpredictable and resistant-to-genre electronic music of recent decades. From the understated arrival of his No Tricks EP in 2004 onward, the British producer has drawn on a wide range of sources—early-’80s funk and electro, art rock, raw and classicist house, and noise—while reshaping those elements into decayed, disorienting forms. His tracks, at one stage labeled “R&B concrète” by the artist himself, have left some DJs uncertain yet found eager adopters among more exploratory selectors operating in house, techno, dubstep, and the area now called deconstructed club music. As one of the most widely praised figures in sonic experimentation, Cunningham has appeared repeatedly on The Wire’s annual Top 50, beginning with Splazsh (2010) and extending through AZD (2017). He has continued to surprise audiences via LAGEOS (2018), which featured the London Contemporary Orchestra; Karma & Desire (2020), which included vocals by Zsela and Sampha among others; and the closely spaced LXXXVIII (2023) and Statik (2024), both containing some of his most hallucinatory yet straightforward material. Also in 2024 he issued Darren J. Cunningham, a continuous mix composed entirely of previously unreleased originals.

As a youngster in his birthplace of Wolverhampton, England, Cunningham studied clarinet, yet he set the instrument aside to focus on football, which he pursued into his early twenties as a striker for West Bromwich Albion F.C. When an injury ended that athletic path, he shifted his attention to music, first as a DJ and later as a producer using a Roland Groovebox and a Dictaphone. His first proper release came in 2004 on his own Werk Discs imprint with the No Tricks EP, easily the most direct entry in his catalog yet already suggesting the scuffed and warped qualities that would later define his sound. Several years of refinement led to Hazyville, issued on Werk in 2008. That promise was realized with the outstanding second album Splazsh, which appeared on the Honest Jon’s label and headed The Wire’s Top 50 chart for 2010. By then Cunningham had already supplied remixes for Alex Smoke, Kode9, and Joy Orbison, among others, while Werk had established itself as one of the most respected and forward-thinking independents, serving as a reliable home for Lone, Zomby, and Lukid.

Cunningham returned in 2012 with the third Actress album, R.I.P., his most abstract and distinctive statement up to that moment. That same year he joined artist Yayoi Kasuma for a performance at London’s Tate Modern gallery and supplied remixes for John Cale and Kasabian. His fourth album, Ghettoville, emerged in 2014 on Ninja Tune; Cunningham darkly described the stark collection as “the bleached out and black tinted conclusion of the Actress image,” though an edition in the !K7 label’s long-running DJ-Kicks mix series appeared before the close of 2015. Another full-length production project backed by Ninja Tune, the densely conceived AZD, followed a couple of years later, shortly after Cunningham’s secondary aliases—previously including Levantis and GNESIS—expanded through three limited cassette singles issued as That Knightsbridge OG, Dial 666 8100, and Bank of England. He returned swiftly later in 2017 with the Audio Track 5 EP, the initial outcome of his work with the London Contemporary Orchestra, with whom he had performed the previous year in London and Moscow. An exploratory album-length collaboration with the LCO, LAGEOS, arrived in 2018, as did an untitled EP credited to Young Paint and billed as a partnership between Cunningham and a “learning program.”

Activity resumed in 2020 with 88, a freely distributed mixtape-style set that preceded the full-length Karma & Desire. Cunningham’s most conventionally collaborative recording to date, Karma & Desire was enriched by instrumentation from Kara-Lis Coverdale and multiple contributions from Zsela and Sampha, among additional vocalists. “AZD Surf,” a joint effort with Mount Kimbie’s Kai Campos, surfaced in 2022. The producer next released Dummy Corporation, an EP anchored by a nineteen-minute title track. He also reworked Tirzah’s “Sink In” and added to John Cale’s Mercy before delivering his subsequent album-length statement, the comparatively immediate though still idiosyncratic LXXXVIII, which appeared in October 2023. Only eight months afterward he returned with the similarly approachable Statik on Smalltown Supersound, the Oslo-based label that had earlier commissioned a Carmen Villain remix from him. Later that year Smalltown issued Darren J. Cunningham (printed in Ukrainian), the producer’s Resident Advisor podcast from earlier in the year, which contained solely exclusive material.