Enter stage right! The world of Actress

Underground tech house hero Actress has revealed that he’s currently working on a new record. The South Norwood-based DJ/producer (aka Darren Cunningham), whose November 2008 album ‘Hazyville’ became a word of mouth sensation, has signed a deal for his forthcoming long-player with one of his favourite labels.

“I’ve signed a deal with Honest Jons, who’ll be putting out the next album,” unveiled Cunningham. “I appreciate where they’re coming from — I really like the last few releases they’ve put out, from the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, to Carl Craig and Moritz Von Oswald’s album. My next record is going to be slightly different.”

Actress’s debut album and clutch of remixes for Alex Smoke and Various Productions have marked him as one of the most singular — and interesting — artists to emerge in UK house music circles in years. Taking the Atlantis-deep disco tech of artists like Moodymann and Theo Parrish as his first point of reference, Cunningham’s cuts have a uniquely London flavour, submerged in blurry, smudged sonics that conjure as much atmosphere as they do danceability.

“As well as the Detroit guys, people like DJ Pierre, Virgo, Gemini and Green Velvet are all influences. But there are also things like Prodigy, and Daft Punk, Quincy Jones, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, all of those in terms of the texture of the sound and the emotion. I love songs, it’s not just about electronic music for me. But I am quite demented at the same time, quite random, so when you mix all that together it can be quite an interesting experience.

“I smoke a lot of weed so really my sound is going to be quite blurred out and that’s how I like it,” Cunningham explained. “But in terms of ‘Hazyville’, it was called that because that was where I was at that moment in time. There were a lot of restrictions on ‘Hazyville’ that shaped the record but my newer stuff has drifted in a different direction.”

Actress’s own influence extends beyond his productions: alongside Gavin Weale, he runs Werk Discs, whose recent run of releases from Lukid, Disrupt and most famously, Zomby’s ‘Where Were You In ’92?’ album have made it one of the hippest and most collectable labels in the land. More a musical hothouse than a typical imprint, Cunningham allows his artists free rein.
“Werk doesn’t run like a conventional label. We’ve got artists who have the opportunity, a canvas, to put some work on. I don’t tie any of my artists exclusively to Werk, they’re free to work with other labels.

“Our next big release is from Lone, who’s doing his album ‘Ecstasy and Friends’, it’s amazing. People will compare it to Boards Of Canada but it’s a lot more washed out and woozy. It’s heading back towards the ’80s sensibility, very slick.”

Beyond his album, Actress has several other new projects in the works. A collaborative EP with dubstep enigma Zomby, entitled ‘Paint, Straw And Bubbles’ and remixes of Anthony ‘Shake’ Shakir’s classic ‘Arise’ arrive shortly; in the meantime, get acquainted with ‘Hazyville’ and find out why Actress ain’t playing…

Actress Essentials
‘Hazyville’ (Werk)
Like Theo Parrish heard through a gauzy London ganja smog: funky, atmospheric and otherworldly.

‘Ghosts Have A Heaven’ (Prime Numbers)
Exclusive track for Trus’ Me’s excellent label and further proof that no one is doing that trippy disco tech quite like Actress.

Tom Trago ‘Lost In The Streets Of NYC (Actress Remix)’ (Rush Hour Recordings)
His latest re-lick, this speedy techno number is old skool, granite tough fast Detroit rawness, peppered with strange soulful samples.

Acceptable In The 80s - But Now?

Left: The 80s lovin' Ladyhawke

The glorification of the 1980s music scene in its many stripes - from lime green, through pastels and scuffed monotones - continues apace.

Having already enjoyed a considerable 'comeback'in the early 2000s, it seems that, far from waning, our fascination with electro pop, goth rock, and baggy beats is reaching its very apex. Acts like Ladyhawke, La Roux and White Lies are the most popular, 'coolest' new kids on the block - all of whom wear their 'me' decade references proudly on their rolled up suit sleeves. Ultra-mainstream sensitive piano balladeers Keane have ditched the dewy eyed Steinway stylings and embraced the great synth funk sugar rush of Scritti Politti and King; and 1988's 'second summer of love', which produced a slew of acid house chart hits in the UK, is echoed in the revivalist thump of The Juan MacLean's piano fixated 'Happy House', and Kikumoto Allstars 'House Music'. But what does it all mean?



It's clear that trends in the world of music are cyclical. Back in 2001, The Strokes caused a sea change in listener attitudes with the release of their debut album 'Is This It?'
Championed by the NME, here was a band who were taking it back to basics - really, recycling Velvet Underground, Jonathan Richman, Television and all the NYC touchstones into an easily palatable, shiny, and crucially really very strong package - returning to the 'authentic' ideals of rock which dance music, their great fear, had quelled for so long. Legions of copyist acts, and other self proclaimed traditionalists emerged from the woodwork, and dance was of course proclaimed dead. Quite simply, it seemed that electronics were out of vogue. The Strokes, White Stripes, et al, were simply looking further back, to certain touchstones from the PREVIOUS decade, the 70s rich loam of proto-punk, megalithic blues rock, and new wave. Briefly, the stargazing, brave new future visions of electro progenitors Kraftwerk, and pop prodigies The Human League, with their synths will solve everything attitude, were forgotten.

But at the same time that The Strokes were emerging, the underground electroclash scene was in its embryonic stages. At a time that referencing the throb of 80s rhythms was laughable to many, a rag-tag collective of artists shrugged and threw themselves into recreating the delirious thrill of simple melodies, rendered with old skool synths,but crucially, on their terms. Check out Miss Kittin and Golden Boy's deceptively bittersweet 'Rippin Kittin', it's disturbing lyrics at odds with the jaunty, melancholy tinged song:




Or the tongue in cheek '1982':



Neither were ever released with the commercial market in mind, and coming from the dance scene, were unlikely to have an impact beyond the club crowd, considering their release dates, (2001 and 1999 respectively). But with the UK music scene in particular tired with rock once again, and looking to electronics for their thrill, the 80s-obsessed types have pounced, with a considerably more wide ranging market in mind.

It's likely to be a generational factor that has determined this shift. The 70s seemed such a pull for so long, it was only a matter of time before we succumbed to the subsequent decade. The difference now is that perceived 'fashion mistakes' both sartorially and otherwise - can be seen through a lens no longer obfuscated by irony. Kids who grew up in the 80s and had its music indelibly wired into the mainframes are now returning to it, and tired of the endless nostalgia bandwagon and radio repeats, are now recasting it in their own images. It's perhaps Stuart Price who's had the last laugh. The Reading producer and songwriter - initally ridiculed by many for his 80s indebted acts Les Rhythmes Digitales and Zoot Woman, is now producing for Keane and Madonna.



That was then. The below is now.



Now that's ironic.

Sounds of da future: the new wave of electronic garage

Left: Romanian producer TRG


The endlessly shifting, fractious DNA helix of dance music evolves and mutates from one week to the next. What could be the biggest news of the moment is quickly old hat, as genres become new ones, sub strands are conceived from the fecund loins of rave culture, and sounds move on.

While dubstep and the new wave of UK funky (think Afro house beats and offbeat Soca percussion, mixed with electronic dubby basslines) are considered to be the best thing since sliced bread right now, a sleeping giant is already stirring from its slumber, and threatening to engulf those sounds in 2009 - that of future garage.

Indeed, like many such nebulous descriptions, the glibly conceived term future garage has its roots in music that has already existed - UK garage, Detroit techno, grime, and of course dubstep - but simply arranges them in a way so compelling and crisp that it induces legions to follow its lead, and create their own twists on the formula.

For many, Burial's 'Untrue', with it's sublime screwface Brian Eno posturing and melancholic psycho-geographic audio depictions of London, was year dot. Pitch shifting the ultra bright, pink neon love lorn tones of UK garage and R&B divas into tear stained, fractured, abyssal stares, and ditching the rave entropy SSSLLLOOWWW beats of dubstep for the polyrhythmic bump 'n' grind funk shuffle of UK garage and two step, but of course drenched in dark London rains of synth sadness, Burial was molding something new, an evolved language from the much missed glory days.

But the man also known as Will Bevan's late 2007 darkage classic (both in the sense of dark garage and 'dark - age') was not the only record to embrace the shuffling rhythm and pair it with more pitchy backdrops. Beneath the surface, a whole movement has been gathering that looks set to rapidly consume the molasses drums of dubstep. This mutant two step is everywhere- from Romanian producer TRG's conflations of prime era Photek, hardcore rave stabs and the bump 'n' flex beats of '97 London, to Cloud's 'Timekeeper', a bizarre boom tick tick track blending Aphex Twin atmospherics, the dubbed out melodica of Augustus Pablo, and those tell tale street rhythms to mesmeric effect. Spatial, Pangaea, Martyn, 2562, Silkie and many more have all twisted the mid tempo, sinuous grooves of garage into their own singular forms. But why now?

With dubstep's dominance at an all time high, it's perhaps become apparent that the slowest beats of that genre simply don't translate to the dancefloor all that well. Burning trees at home is a different matter, but however rib rattling the bass waves sound pumping out of a Funktion One stack in a club, if the beats are too slow, all you can do is shuffle around moodily. Future garage gets the best of all worlds, capturing the dark atmospherics, and sublow pressure of dubstep, but wraps them in those bubbling beats - impossible to resist in their funking mood to swing.

Future garage takes those early flipside experiments of the Groove Chronicles, El-B, and Menta set - the darker, bass heavy instrumental'dubs' of more commercial garage tracks tucked away on b-sides, that so fascinated a young Skream, Hatcha, et al and kicked off dubstep - and continues the lineage in a more literal, and yet more willing to experiment manner, within the rhythmic strictures, of course. This is set to be an endless fascinating annum in the continual evolution of the genre. Reload and come again!

Skull Disco: Dystopian beats

Headbusting, cranium crunching, cerebellum cauterizing - that's the output of ostensible dubstep label Skull Disco, now defunct after only a handful of releases. And yet, in only a few slow, quiet but immensely menacing releases, they've utterly altered the musical landscape of UK bass culture and beyond.

Skull Disco is the most potent musical vision of a dark future we've witnessed thus far, where swooping phantasms of malevolent machinery skim over our heads, the ghosts of disquiet never far behind. Skull Disco's trick - and the name evokes, quite literally, our synaptic connections dancing and pinging back and forth, such are the audio hallucinations they conjure - is to make this darkness compelling, utterly immersive, and even spine tinglingly beautiful.

Perfectly capturing the malaise that currently enshrouds the globe, tracks by only a handful of artists - Appleblim, Shackleton and Gatekeeper - combine a string of cultural signifiers in bizarre and gob smacking new ways.

Dubwise echoes, samples of dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, 'Mentasm' hoovers, hardcore synth stabs are placed in an unfamiliar, fearful context. Shackleton's 'Hamas Rule' is extraordinary - an Arabesque procession of clicks and Middle Eastern drum hits, and the occasional Oriental melody, but charged with disquiet, evoking an uneasy peace before the next barrage of weaponry and all the more chilling in the current climate of war between Hamas' Gaza and Israel.

Appleblim's 'Fear' is prickles of cold sweat forming on the back of your neck, immense cityblock demolishing waves of bass summoned from the Earth, riding a slow, entropic beat, as Kwesi Johnson issues his ghostly warning of incipient tension: 'Madness tight in the heads of the rebels", evil blades of '97 vintage tech step synths cutting through the track.

Shackleton's 'Blood On My Hands' bears the same blueprint of 'Hamas Rule', but instead coasts on barely there Oriental percussion, and barely audible spoken word intonations beneath, as spectral keys crystallize into being.

Their first compilation, 'Soundboy Punishments', on which these tracks appear, is the perfect entry point, and a gateway into a new sonic portal, but 'Soundboy's Gravestone Descecrated by Vandals' similarly explores their compellingly twisted logic and narratives of UK bass gothic. The titles themselves place Skull Disco in the distinguished lineage of soundsystem crushing dub culture, referencing the 'soundboy murder' exhortations of dancehall and junglist toasters. Let the music into your skull and leave its indelible mark.