Ninja Tune
Actress x London Contemporary Orchestra - LAGEOS
$39.00
Ninja Tune
Actress x London Contemporary Orchestra - LAGEOS
$39.00
“At a first glance, techno and contemporary classical music do not seem like ideal partners. One, a bass-heavy hedonistic genre designed for dancefloors, the other suited to the calm of the concert hall. Yet Darren Cunningham, aka electronic producer Actress, and the London Contemporary Orchestra have built their careers in pushing boundaries of genre.
Both sets of artists explore the hybridity between the electronic and the acoustic: the LCO regularly records experimental film scores, including Jonny Greenwood’s recent anxiety-inducing compositions for You Were Never Really Here, and last year Actress performed a live rendition of Steve Reich’s 1988 work Different Trains. On Lageos, rather than have the orchestra approximate the alien sounds of Actress’s electronics, they formulate a new sonic palette that is in equal measures intriguing and unsettling.
The album is often upbeat: strings streak in between clattering, fairground rhythms on Galya Beat, while Hubble and N.E.W. are softer, more melodic interpretations of Actress’s previous releases. It is in moments of quiet ambience, though, that Lageos excels, blurring the boundaries between static and harmony on Momentum or between creaking double bass and kick drum on Voodoo Possee, Chronic Illusion. A challenging yet satisfying listen.” – The Guardian
Item description:
|
Artist: |
Actress x London Contemporary Orchestra |
|
Title: |
Lageos |
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Label: |
Ninja Tune |
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Format: |
2 x Vinyl, LP |
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Pressing: |
Europe |
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Release Date: |
25th May 2018 |
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Genre: |
Electronic |
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Style: |
Minimal, Leftfield, Abstract |
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Catalog No: |
ZEN251 |
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Condition: |
New |
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Where the demands of writing caught the artist slumped and reclined, devoid of any soul, acutely aware of the simulated prism that required breakout.
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The scripts now carry tears, the world has returned to a flattened state, and out through that window, the birds look back into the cage they once inhabited.
Spitting flames behind a white wall of silence.
The machines have turned to stone, data reads like an obituary to its user.
A fix is no longer a release, it's a brittle curse. Zero satisfaction, no teeth, pseudo artists running rampant, but the path continues.
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Artist - Title:
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Actress, real name Darren Jordan Cunningham, known to friends as DAZ, returns with a new album, now on Ninja Tune and a new music system called “AZD” (pronounced “Azid”), a chrome aspect journey into a parallel world. An artist who has always preferred to make music than to talk about it, in “AZD” he has achieved another remarkable landmark, one which is as resistant to interpretation as it is demanding of it. Following on from his previous albums, R.I.P, Splazsh and Hazyville, an epilogue poem attached to the press release for Ghettoville was construed by media, commentators and spectators that Cunningham had retired. This led him to conceptualise this mass of conclusion as the key to ‘Giving power back to identity.’
So a few pointers, or possible ways to think about “AZD”. The album is themed around chrome – both as a reflective surface to see the self in, and as something that carves luminous voids out of any colour and fine focuses white and black representing the perfect metaphor for the bleakness of life in the Metropolis as suggested by Anish Kapoors Cloud Gate.
Another way to approach would be through the art of James Hampton and Rammellzee (who inspired “CYN,” which Cunningham also sees as a vision of New York in reverse…) – both of whom, though of different generations of the African-American slave diaspora, created art through “Sourcing castaway materials from their environment and reinterprating them into absolute majesty given from the fourth dimension.” There is also the career-long influence of the Detroit techno pioneers, something which becomes clear on this album “there is a contrast in the type of glow or reflection”.
Alternatively, you could write your PhD thesis on Jung’s Shadow Theory and AZD: “Lots of ideas come from dreams, this isn’t new, but sometimes the conscious mind starts to meld into the universal consciousness through constellation tunnelling.” If that sounds too taxing then you could always fall back on Star Wars and, in particular, the Death Star: “It has a dark dystopian backdrop, with highly sophisticated technology, but it is fading into the ether, still holding on and emitting a powerful energy. The music remaking the embers, binding them together and pulling them apart again.”
Alternatively, just listen. That “glow” Cunningham talks about makes this in some ways more immediate than previous Actress releases. Take lead single, “X22RME” (pronounced “Extreme”) which elegantly plays between the lines of Oriental classic rave and Balinese warehouse Techno machined in a Rotherhithe lock up welding the grooves into a seamless cracked joint.
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The simplest you could say about “AZD” is that it’s art – the unique creation of a unique mind. There will be few more distinctive, brilliant or visionary suites of music released in 2017. Call him what you will, this is the year that Darren ‘Daz’ Cunningham - aka Actress, aka AZD – asserts more clearly than ever before his complete independence. “Actress has a talent for melodies that snag at you, as demonstrated on the music-box ambience of Falling Rizlas, or Blue Window, on which house music battles to be heard over the sound of tape hiss. He also has an ability to twist the sound of dance music until it sounds private and intimate. Even the album’s most upbeat moment, X22RME, has a strangely introverted atmosphere to it: when the beats drop out, it doesn’t feel like a euphoric breakdown, but rather as if someone’s mind has wandered in the middle of the dancefloor.” – The Guardian
“…for all its artfully-deployed discordance, *AZD *maintains a musicality that holds the listener close. Sometimes this comes through in more danceable techno moments, like the single “X22RME” or the 80s-leaning synth-driven track “RUNNER,”; elsewhere, it’s in the emotive minimalist breaks of “FALLING RIZLAS” or “THERE'S AN ANGEL IN THE SHOWER.” Cunningham participates in a futurist tradition, following an arc set by artists and writers like Rammellzee and Eshun. But that futurism isn’t predictive, something yet to come; rather, his combination of science fictions, music histories, and socio-spatial realities feels deliriously adjacent to the world we’re listening to it in.” – Pitchfork
Item description:
Artist:
Title:
AZD
Label:
Format:
2 x Vinyl, LP, Album
Pressing:
UK
Release Date:
2017
Genre:
Electronic
Style:
IDM, Techno, Experimental
Catalog No:
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Condition:
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