The human voice doesn’t survive for lengthy within the vacuum of Actress’ music; it’s minimize up, spaghettified, dissolved into fog and smoke. Demonic pitch-shifted voices cackle, howl, and recede into the murk. Sampled divas morph into distant ambulance sirens. All of the whereas, Darren Cunningham carries on an arch, amused, perma-blazed commentary; one imagines him as Rod Serling or Vincent Worth, inviting the enterprising listener to comply with him right into a world the place actuality can’t be trusted. His catchphrases and cryptic murmurings are sometimes the one factor connecting the listener to the human world, the one reminder that there’s really a producer behind all of this and that you just’re not simply listening to an unwell wind blowing from Tartarus.
Cunningham’s new album LXXXVIII was impressed by chess—the idle pastime of a steel-trap thoughts. There are some remarkably idle stretches on this 57-minute album, which weaves between quick dance tracks and lengthy, intractable expanses of stasis; it’s the inverse of the standard techno “artist album,” the place the dance tracks are sandwiched between half-baked ambient stocking-stuffers designed to point out off the producer’s compositional bona fides. Lots of the dance tracks on LXXXVIII appear vestigial or underdeveloped; “Oway (f 7 )” is a stark, haunted-sounding loop that by no means builds to something, and “Pluto (a 2) ” cuts off abruptly after lower than three minutes. You get the sense that yawning voids like “Inexperienced Blue Amnesia Magic Haze ( d 7 )” and “Azifiziks ( d 8 )” are the actual coronary heart of the document, that if you happen to peer into their depths for lengthy sufficient you would possibly decode among the byzantine logic that drives this music—or possibly you’re simply gazing a black gap.
LXXXVIII is the Roman numeral for 88. That was the identify of a relatively spry album Cunningham launched comparatively below the radar in 2020, now packaged with the 3xLP version of the brand new document. Additionally it is the variety of keys on a piano, and Cunningham makes use of that instrument as a method to rework his music right into a kind of free jazz. “M2 ( f 8 )” begins out because the form of slight, nacreous keyboard sketch Ryuichi Sakamoto would possibly’ve cranked out between appointments earlier than it’s subsumed right into a loping, side-chained rhythm. “Push Energy ( a 1 )” kicks off the document with a deranged hyena cackle, after which an imperious voice recites robotic instructions and Cunningham ruminates endlessly on a round piano phrase. It scans as a joke on the primary hear, a problem on the second, and one thing actually fairly lovely on the third; simply anticipate the voice that bubbles up on the finish and appears to sing, “Cry.”
