Actress - Welcome to the Headspace

There is a wonderful interview in the March edition of Wire Magazine with Actress (aka - Darren Cummingham ). It covers a fair amount of ground looking at his background in Wolverhampton, his promise as a football player that got cut short by injury and his move to London. Cunningham comes across as rather otherworldly, living in a kind of altered urban reality. He has interesting things to say on the nature of reality, space, music, how music can heal and attempting to get the sounds in his head out in musical form.

Under the Actress moniker he has released 4 LPs, Hazyville (2008), Splazsh (2010), RIP(2012) and his latest release Ghettoville (2014) on Ninja Tunes. Imagine the fractured musical sound of Burial refracted through a hazy mesh of broken speakers, weed smoke, field recordings and relentless rain. It sounds like the film Se7en looks, a noirish combination of grimey undercurrents and forward motion.

There is a small glimpse into the music making process for Actress and the analogue equipment, field recordings and overloading of circuits that are crucial to the weird, warped sound world that features on the Actress releases.

Below is an Actress track Grey Over Blue from his Ninja Tune 12"  that outlines the kind of dislocated sonic ground that his LPs traverse. I would recommend buying the LPs and losing yourself in the blurred South London via Wolverhampton head space of Darren Cunningham.



Quietus Interview - http://thequietus.com/articles/14423-actress-interview-ghettoville
Electronic Beats Interview -http://www.electronicbeats.net/en/features/interviews/an-interview-with-actress/

Kode 9 and Spaceape - Black Sun (Hyperdub)

Great news from Hyperdub that Kode9 and Spaceape are teaming up again to release a new LP titled Black Sun on the 18th April in the UK. It got a great review in this months Wire and I can't wait for the release.

Nice review here as well on Spoon Feed - Kode 9 and Space Ape Black Sun Review

This is the full track listing. The cover art is beautiful, its one of the things that Hyperdub always seem to get right.

Nice interview with them at Big Shot - Kode 9 and Spaceape Interview

In the interview Spaceape outlines the way he approached writing the material for the LP.

"...During the recording of the album I had some serious health problems and this is reflected in some of the tracks. As a writer you take inspiration from many places with your own life being one of the main sources. But I wanted to turn my experiences into something less personal and more oblique, more open. We decided to write a fictional story about life under a black sun using elements of my experience to create this imagined world, a place that breathed a different atmosphere; had different rules; politics; desires; religions; a different light to our own. This was a way of linking all the tracks and shows how the many different characters and stories could inhabit the same space...."

This is the full track listing. The cover art is beautiful, its one of the things that Hyperdub always seem to get right.

1. "Black Smoke" [ft. Cha Cha]
2. "Promises"
3. "Bullet Against Bone"
4. "Green Sun"
5. "The Cure" [ft. Cha Cha]
6. "Hole in the Sky"
7. "Otherman"
8. "Love Is the Drug" [ft. Cha Cha]
9. "Black Sun (Partial Eclipse Mix)"
10. "Neon Red Sign" [ft. Cha Cha]
11. "Am I"
12. "Kryon" [ft. Flying Lotus]

You can here the single version of Black Sun via Spotify - Kode9 – Black Sun/2 Far Gone

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