A few months back I fell in love with Actress’ single “Hubble”. I think I’ve listened to it a trillion times, and it never gets old. Actress is in fact the artist alias for London-based producer Darren Cunningham, and his latest album Splazsh was released at the end of May 2010 to wide critical acclaim — don’t be surprised if it wins the prize for best techno album of the year. Actress’ sound has been described as such:
Much of Actress’ music is deliberately lo-fi, suffused with the slippery grit of encoding errors and low-bitrate YouTube videos, to the point that the distortion and compression become strangely beautiful in their own right. It’s the modern-day equivalent of boom-bap hiphop’s preference for scratchy wax, which makes sense, since today’s crate-diggers are increasingly discovering the musical past not through thrift-store vinyl, but dubious VHS dubs uploaded to the web, grainy and flickering with errant pixels.
Just this morning I noticed he uploaded the following video for “Supreme Cunnilingus” which took found footage of a Jean Claude Van Damme appearance on a low-rate European talk show and edited it in such a way as to reflect its title. I’ve also attached the amazing “Hubble” below as well. You can follow Actress on Last.fm, Facebook, and MySpace.
