Before becoming a producer, Darren J. Cunningham (aka actress) was destined to be a professional soccer player until a serious injury ended her hopes and dreams.
A fan of techno culture, the devastated teenager dedicated himself to his passion of the moment, DJing and music production. Benefiting from a scholarship to study recording arts at university, the curious Cunningham moved to London and plunged headlong into underground club culture.
Within a few years, Cunningham recorded unconventional tech spaces and sent hopeful demos to Detroit’s Underground Resistance collective. Making her acting debut in 2008 with the critically acclaimed Hazyville on her own label Werk Discs, the artist temporarily established herself as one of the leading voices of left-wing electronic music, cementing her reputation on other LPs Splazsh and R. I. P before exhausting her production aesthetic on a cryptic fourth LP, Ghettoville.
After the actress’s return in 2017 with the joyful concept album AZD, Cunningham will expand her sonic palette and demonstrate her influences by participating in a reinterpretation of Steve Reich’s new classic, Different Trains, and, later, Sin (x). , an artistic tribute to Karlheinz Stockhausen. This year, the actress’ tenth studio album, Statik, is a testament to Cunningham’s uncanny ability to transport the listener through an adventure of meditative, celestial ambient pieces.
People may not know that you signed for West Bromwich Albion as a teenager. In retrospect, had your career not been derailed by injury, do you think you would have chosen football over music?
“It would have been up to me to answer the question at the time, but when I grew up I was one hundred percent committed to football. I had played since I was 6 years old and I signed for West Brom when I was 8. So I was institutionalized and had tunnel vision when the game came along. After sitting in a hospital bed at the age of 19, staring at the bonfire of my career, I had to make a decision.
“I grew up with music and enjoyed it from an auditory dance standpoint, however, when I was 12 years old, I don’t forget to watch a documentary that followed Shy FX as he composed one of his wonderful anthems. It gave me an idea of how to create music with computers and split samples and it was the first time I thought: wow, that’s how the jungle is done. It was a very vital moment to watch the process, and it stuck in my head.
How did things go from there?
“I’ve had a recurring injury for over 3 years, and at one point I made the quick resolution to buy some turntables and DJ mixing equipment I saw in the back of a music magazine. I practiced the adjustment with my leg in a cast on a chair in my mom and dad’s garage. Friends would come over and play songs and I learned how to mix, which I learned pretty quickly. It became a hobby for the six weeks I was in the cast and it was the first time I started thinking about taking my career in another direction.
“I’m constantly submitting mixes and DJ tapes to a competition in a music magazine called Bedroom Bedlam. To be successful in football or music, you have to be completely dedicated, so anything that can upgrade you has to require a point of determination not parity, at least very close. If you asked me now, I still don’t know if I could answer your initial question, but at 44 years old I would probably dedicate myself to music.
We know that the PFA has allowed you to pursue a degree in recording arts. . .
“I am a life member of the Football Players Association, but it is not like now. If what happened to me had happened now, there would have been an era of counseling to help replace the situation that can be devastating for someone transitioning into a new career.
“That framework didn’t exist at the time, but I maintained a certain point of foresight in terms of accomplishing anything in my life. I never got a recommendation or talked to anyone and I had to push the PFA to attend a private university because the fees were quite high, but it was genuine help and I will be grateful to them for their support.
Was it around this time that you moved to London?
“I needed a new challenge in my life and I had a rebellious nature, so I decided to move to London and embark on this total lifestyle. I wanted to go underground and find out what was crazy, what is not for the timid if you really like It wasn’t so much the pilot course, but rather a moving experience in London, and the most productive thing was that I met other wonderful people who are still my most productive friends today.
Did you expect elegance to be academically informative or did you just need to go ahead and start creating?
“I’m a little naive about the whole thing because I had to go through a level where someone asked me if I could submit a strong application. At the time he had a small setup consisting of a Roland MC-303 Groovebox, a mixing console, a dictaphone and a small guitar effects pedal, which I still use from time to time. All my concepts were recorded analogue on MiniDisc, so I sent them and invited them for a one-on-one interview.
“When I was accepted, they showed me all these gadgets and all I saw were knobs, dimmers, and knobs. At 18 or 19 I had the idea of going straight into blending and forums and being a sound engineer, but after the first week the truth was that everything became about physics, theory, acoustics and formulas. Array I don’t forget. Thinking, that’s great, but it’s school and that’s not what I want to know.
“I discovered Max/MSP in 1999 and had no idea what it was. I asked myself, ‘What is this primitive thing?’ It was an intellectual era because I didn’t see how to apply what I had studied to what I was really looking to do, as you suggest, I didn’t have the fundamental principles of synthesis and I was operating in a spirit of musical creation.
After making some first productions, you founded your own label, Werk Discs. Did you first look for a place for your outings?
“The label came about in 2005, so it was a little later. Some of us had gone crazy and had DJ parties, but I never sent music to the labels, except for a couple of tracks that I was happy with and that were cut on a dubbing plate in a Jamaican record shop on Acre Lane, Brixton. There was a round of assembly, so I asked if I could bring some pieces and do a bit of dubbing.
“I brought my MiniDisc player and recorded two tracks, one of which was Ghosts Have a Heaven, but now I don’t forget the B-side. I kept a dubbing board, gave one to a friend and sent the other to Underground Resistance/Submerge. At the time, I was also a big fan of Chicago maker Gemini on Green Velvet’s Relief Records, but I discovered they had joined a European label called Cyclo and visited them with my MiniDisc player and played a few tracks. demo songs, which they loved, but which weren’t compatible with their genre-specific edition of Chicago/deep French house. The music was essentially what I still make today.
You had a good start with your last LP, Hazyville, but there was a moment of disappointment after the release of Ghettoville in 2014. You described the album as a “conclusion. ” What did you think about this?
“I didn’t have any intellectual disorder or any disorder writing music because I make things every day, whether it’s a melodic concept or whatever. It’s more the feeling of having spent a lot of time selecting a variety or palette of sounds and continuing to draw from that bank. Before I started Ghettoville, I knew I was exhausting this storehouse of concepts: each and every one of them in a collapsed state, almost like that bonfire I talked about at the end of my football career.
“I realized that before I started writing music or coming up with concepts for an album, if I wanted to continue doing it, I had to replace everything, which meant not only creating new sounds, but also acquiring tools to generate new knowledge. and take learning my trade to another level. I felt like I was mastering the setup I had built upon arriving in London and becoming more and more competent.
“That’s when I would have liked to dedicate more time to my university studies, because suddenly it became logical that I needed to be informed about acoustics, broadcasting, etc. I learned that in order for music to remain attractive to me and give the impression that it is evolving, I would actually have to evolve and find new inspirations. Ghettoville a clever bookend for that time in my life.
Did you also want a new story?
“To be fair to you, since my first album I looked at death a lot. Hazyville is an ode to my grandmother, who was necessarily my most productive friend and someone I missed dearly, and she also had residue from the death of my football career. It’s about harnessing and expressing that emotional content, and during my time in Ghettoville, I felt like I’d been stripped of everything. Those first albums were my era of treatment or counseling, so I guess I needed to move towards some kind of resurrection.
That’s why samplers are like that because they allow you to organize the noise, which for me is the most productive thing. . . because from that organization of sounds you can create the most beautiful things.
These themes would be easier to convey if you were a classical composer. Without a lyrical outlet, do you find it more difficult to explain explicit themes through music?
“It’s very difficult to answer questions based on how you did something because I don’t really know him. I can only say that I knew what the global was like: it was grayscale and monotonous, so I didn’t need colorful sounds. I didn’t even need synth sounds, because I had a lot of trouble working with bright or natural sounds. I don’t know what to do with a synthesizer sound, but I know what to do with a natural-sounding sine wave.
“I’ve been drawn to the comfortable ear cushions and bell sounds, as well as what we might call static ‘white noise’. As a child, I found myself focusing on the sounds around me with a sense of lack of organization, whether it was a car, a truck, birds, or birds. trees. That’s why samplers are so important because they allow you to organize noise, which for me is the most productive. . . because from that organization of sounds you can create the most beautiful thing.
“The origin of concepts and how they are modulated is a great obelisk, however, my life has revolved around art and the strength of what it can do. At first, I never related music to art, but after university, it has become transparent to He told me that music can simply be art. When I discovered that music can only be physical and visual, I found it infinitely fascinating. If my music were visual art, it would be a combination of sculpture and graffiti.
In your productions, is there a transparent demarcation between the level of creation and the more technical level of mixing?
“I’ve been through other eras in terms of music. The time when my setup was minimal consisted of a Japanese Kawai K5000 synthesizer, which I bought more for its beautiful silver aesthetic, but it also had a lot of MIDI macro features for me. to experiment. I would plug it into my Groovebox and once I knew I could use the keys instead of the buttons on the machine, everything would open up. My entire procedure is based on experimentation because this feeling of being rewarded is unparalleled.
“That’s where my musical spirit comes from and, although my music doesn’t include lyrics, I take vocal notes and sing concepts to give them to someone or put my own voice on them. At some point I can see my identity forming, so from the beginning I made the resolution to stick with it instead of making drum tracks
My main goal is to dedicate my life to mastering the Kronos, which will lead me to a complex era.
Have you moved to a more complex setup while maintaining your basic artistic principles?
“My studio now has 3 other aspects. A station could be based in particular on the computer that controls a sequencer, synthesizer or drum machine, which is its own system, and the station will be controlled through a computer that is more rack-based and contains a pedal. of Eventide effects, an Emu E4X sampler. . and a Kurzweil K2500R synthesizer. A third station is more intense, with a computer connected to the Korg Kronos synthesizer.
“My main goal is to dedicate my life to mastering the Kronos, which will lead me to old age [laughs]. I try to keep things attractive by staying in one position for too long, but there will come a time when I’ll unify everything running into a single sequencer until it’s all synchronized in combination like a large nuclear hadron collider sounds from several Elektron Digitakt. Machines.
Korg Kronos Workstation Review
“Historically, Ableton is the canvas. I combine everything there and play the final pre-master, but I used Reason and Cubase and there was a time when I only used BIAS’s Peak sound editor, which is similar to Sound Forge. I don’t mix, I just know how I need anything to sound and I hand it off to a mastering engineer.
Are the concepts preconceived or are you looking for some kind of trigger?
“Inspiration is rarely present, so I like to have triggers that can prompt a response. I rarely collect books and Sotheby’s art catalogs for inspiration and there are days when I’m not in the studio but I have things on my PC in some other room that gives me knowledge about the occasions of the song.
“If something jumps out at you, whether it’s a note, a pattern, a chord, or a velocity, I research it and take it into the studio. My total painting scenario is made up of analyzing and tracing this balance between combinations of sounds, whether it’s a hi-hat or the in-between noise that gels everything.
There’s been an ambient detail to your sound, but would you say your tenth album, Statik, goes more in that direction?
“I don’t really know what the environment is. In the context of Actress, you can simply say that Statik is the most BGM I’ve done so far, but it’s no Brian Eno. All the music is ambient and I seek to break the limits of genres, but above all it is a quite nostalgic album. Everything was written in a very short time and the only time I made an album like that was on Splazsh.
In the United Kingdom it rains all the time, so a lot of my inspiration comes from the weather, the clouds, the sky and space.
“I read a quote from a fashion designer who said that when he’s about to launch a collection, the first thing he does is go back to all his previous work, get to the bottom of all the concepts that make it up, and then replace it, replace it, replace it. . . I would say that it is very close to what Statik is. You’d expect the name to come from degrees of statics or sounds that can be described simply as such, but I’m actually interested. to find out if the weather and rain had an influence. In the United Kingdom it rains all the time, so a lot of my inspiration comes from the weather, the clouds, the sky and space.
“Not stars, but meteorites or remote planets that look like pebbles in deep space and are so unreal to our perception of reality, and yet generation allows us to see them. Everything blends together in this in-depth study of art, music, my own personal studio and other artists that I really respect, musically and visually.
Take Static, for example, where bursts of sound cut through condensed layers of noise. What could this dense resonance box be made of?
“Static ventured into some other aspect of my process, which has to do with collage. I have tracks that maybe I just used or that I’m not going to use at all, but that involve anything, which can be just a millisecond of sound that can be taken out and placed on some other track. As for the overall sound of the piece, I think it’s just a lot of experimentation over a period of time that’s probably been on my PC or the Kronos, like an experiment that I’ve continually worked on until I got it under control. get to a point where there is something viable enough to use.
“I don’t forget how it was organized, but I really liked Alva Noto’s music, Basic Channel’s Chain Reaction material, dub, reggae and all the Raster Noton material. I just have this memory bank of buying records of all genres and my brain automatically extracts certain things, so when it comes to modulating ideas, they’re already there.
System Verse turns out to be a nod to ’80s gaming culture with hints of early Yellow Magic Orchestra, or are we completely wrong?
“The truth is that you lack a point, but what I like is that each one will have another point of reference. I mean, it’s all a component of the same continuum, so why do I deny what you just said?For me, I’d say System Verse leans more towards Drexciya mythology: it’s not an electro track because it doesn’t have that hard rhythmic style of 808, but I tried to distill an undeniable chord feel and studied sound and executed it. Snare sound synchronized in such a way that it doesn’t need a hi-hat programmed around it. Again, the point of reference is that he was interested in this Leviathan sea creature. I was born in 1979, so my aesthetic is VHS: rewinding a twisted tape.
We know that it has been using elements of artificial intelligence since 2018. What did it look like? Did the AI elements indicate the procedure in Statik?
“Hmm, the verbal exchange about AI is appealing because I had an idea for AI when I was very young. To me, it’s not a new concept, but I guess it’s new now because we’re hearing about its emergence. I’ve been there and dare I say it’s been in the music, not in the sense of creating it, but the user becomes an AI.
I tried the verbal exchange with the AI now because the chat is no longer available.
“Computer devices and text never refer to the user, the computer, but if you think about things in terms of units, over time, the computer necessarily becomes another member. I tried to experiment with that because it was obvious that it was going to work “. to be part of the musical verbal exchange and I was already past my formative days of gambling at the groovebox. I’ve tried to avoid verbal AI exchange now because chat is no more. That’s how it is and I’m not afraid of it because it’s going nowhere and there’s a lot of laughter, but for what I do, I don’t feel the need to examine the AI too carefully.
Do you still think that it is a tool more than anything else that can take over certain facets of musical creation and get out of control?
“I don’t see how it can be harmful, because it’s a question of money. Large corporations and record labels are looking to upgrade and have effects on the formula and humans aren’t perfect, so what better way than to upgrade them. If you have Drake, who has been in the game for 10 years, his music is very generic, but how can you make the money that keeps coming in bigger?Imitating it or necessarily creating a style of it, they can continue. with him.
“I’m offering this as a fundamental approach, but the truth is, as Drake experienced in his confrontation with Kendrick, the human side will win. The war game where one MC takes on another MC and eliminates melodies and concepts is human interaction: a thought-based activity that a computer cannot surpass, even if its calculations are more supreme.
Actress Statik is now available on Smalltown Supersound.
“Attractive price and very easy to use, it’s the most productive for an orchestral library”: Spitfire Audio Spitfire Symphony Orchestra review
“This set offers abundant sonic interest”: Kilohearts Expressive E Phase Plant Expressive Suite review
“He enjoyed serving them and Watch It Go!Dimebag Darrell is honored through his own brand of whiskey.
MusicRadar is from Future plc, a leading foreign media organization and virtual publisher. Visit our corporate website.