Audiopile Review: Does Actress still use that logo, based on the badge of the Wolverhampton Wanderers soccer team? Is it true that he was once a junior player for Wolves before an injury led him to concentrate on music? Is Vic Godard from Subway Sect really a postman? Is he also the hip-hop critic for Mojo magazine? Uh… sorry… what were we talking about? Sorry, we ate a gummy in preparation for listening to the new Actress… Oh yeah, Actress. Darren ‘Actress’ Cunningham made his name in the early 2010s with albums like ‘Splazsh’ and ‘R.I.P.’ He created a unique, techno-derived sound that recalled the beauty of summer sun refracting through broken glass on glistening tarmac. Since then, he’s taken a quixotic career path, which is perhaps what you’d expect from someone who claims to have been a junior pro soccer player in his English hometown. His latest odd step is releasing a one-sided LP called ‘Grey Interiors’. But here’s the thing: Actress has quietly been enjoying a run of form equivalent to his 2010s breakout years. ‘Grey Interiors’ even features some of the twinkly textures which were a hallmark of that era. But it’s significantly moodier and more abstract. A single 20-minute ambient epic, this ranks as one of the most ambitious releases in a career marked by truly reckless artistic ambition.

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“An imperial phase Actress commits a lushly amorphous installation piece made for the Berliner Festspiele to vinyl, rendering a post-industrial symphony full of iridescent shifts in gyring, OOBE-like spatial coordinates landing somewhere between nutopian ambient, kankyō ongaku and sawn-off bass science.

‘Grey Interiors’ was made in collaboration with Actual Objects and is an absorbing animation and navigation of those post-human ideals that have prompted Darren J. Cunningham to his best work across the preceding two decades. In its hypnagogic symphony of the elements, he short-circuits distinctions of classical music’s metric freedoms and the hyperspatial sensuality of concrète/electro-acoustic and ambient musics with an artistic license that has come to distinguish his work in the contemporary field, and arguably identified him as this generation’s most vital electronic abstractionist.

The first half of the album is bewitchingly airless, materialised in a twinkling vacuum. Naturalistic environmental recordings and a half-heard piano swirl around nauseous airlock whooshes and eerie bass drones. It’s all pulverised to a powdery, shimmering residue; if Actress’s music is defined by its character and texture – that sweet spot between the bedroom and the soundsystem – then this one advances the narrative without losing its backbone. And like a lot of his best work, it comes into its own on the back of zonked eyelids, conjuring a play of shifting geometric patterns within its imaginary physics and nuanced narration of ephemeral melodic phrasing and vaporous textures.

At about the halfway point, that dissociated piano finds its groove, coalescing into a jerky drum machine rhythm popping like bubbles in the stifling atmosphere. We can draw some intersecting lines here thru electronic music lore – traces of vintage AE, Push Button Objects, UR – but Actress always leaves an indelible fingerprint on anything he touches. Even when he’s rubbing against the gallery-industrial complex, he manages to fill a stagnant space with electricity and wit; look at the title itself: is it a reference to the “landscape beyond man” as the installation’s press release might have us believe, or the institutions themselves?” -Boomkat

Proper high grade brain food; if you peeped Deathprod’s stunning ‘Dark Transit’, ‘Grey Interiors’ makes it an epic double-bill.