The Highways of His Life or M2 (f8)Dhanveer Singh BrarSomeone much smarter than me. Someone I look up to. Someone I care about. An older brother, if you will, once wrote: “the idea of the black avant-garde exists, as it were, oxymoronically – as if black, on the one hand, and avant-garde, on the other hand, each depends for its coherence on the exclusion of the other. Now this is probably an overstatement of the case. Yet it’s all but justified by a vast interdisciplinary text representative not only of a problematically positivist conclusion that the avant-garde has been exclusively Euro-American, but of a deeper, perhaps unconscious, formulation of the avant-garde as necessarily not black. Part of what I’m after now is this: an assertion that the avant-garde is a black thing.”I have always taken this to mean that when we go searching for a Black avant-garde, we have to be prepared to look in unexpected places. The route to a Black avant-garde, he seems to be saying, involves walking down – what some might consider – peculiar highways. Where they see strangeness, a road leading them nowhere, we see nothing but beauty. The paths Darren Cunningham went down, the highways he took to make Actress, are a chapter in the story of the Black avant-garde. Cunningham the footballer. Cunningham the Wulfrunian. Cunningham the ex-footballer. Cunningham the DJ. Cunningham the Londoner. Cunningham the producer. Cunningham the painter. Cunningham the writer. Cunningham the composer. This is where the Black avant-garde in Britain is made. This is where you have to go to find it. Football, in many ways, defines the culture of British music. It always has, and the two go hand in hand through hooliganism and casual fashion, as well as rhythm in terms of how you receive then move – receiving and giving the ball – and strategy in terms of how you play against the other team. They call it ‘The Beautiful Game’, and it is a beautiful game, because it isn’t just about kicking a sphere on a pitch. There’s a lot that goes into it. It can be romantic, strategic, physical, beautiful. It can be so many different things. 29th December 1996. The Dell. Southampton Football Club’s home ground. They are playing against Liverpool. Late in the game, the score at nil-nil. A pass from one of the visiting midfielders goes awry and deflects off a defender. With the ball sliding out towards the far right of the Southampton penalty area, the home team’s goalkeeper, Dave Beasant, wants to stop the chance of a corner for Liverpool. He rushes out, far from the safety of his goal. Beasant, it seems, has the idea he can kick the ball clear. Up to the other end of the pitch. Away from danger. Beasant’s kick is no good. It lacks power. His timing is all wrong. His kick lacks height. The ball barely makes it to the centre circle. There, to meet it, is John Barnes. Imagine a teenager, Black, growing up in Wolverhampton. He is seventeen years old. His parents christened him Darren. His full name is Darren Cunningham. His friends calls him Daz. Darren is a Liverpool fan. He wants to be a footballer. Already on the books at West Bromwich Albion, he could be. Darren is watching the team he supports play Southampton in his family home.1993 was when football experts in Britain started to realise what kind of player John Barnes really was. Considered one of the best creative players in the country, if not Europe and possibly the world since 1987, Barnes – tall, powerful, left-footed, able to twist opponents inside out – had his skill ascribed to his Caribbean heritage. Jamaica, many in the football pages and on the terraces thought, was not far from Brazil. Betrayed in 1992 by a ruptured achilles, a diminished Barnes could no longer skip past players. The new version of him had to situate itself further back down the pitch, in central midfield. From there, a hidden image of Barnes’ football revealed itself. An image linked to his childhood love of German football. Deploying intricate, more precise movements, he used passing, not running, to marshal an emerging, impressionable, Liverpool team. That cold December night in 1996, as the year was ticking towards a close, the Southampton players, the fans in the crowd, and those seeing the game on television, were given a snapshot of what the new Barnes could do. What the old Barnes had always done. Using only a second or two to seize up the angles and distance, without pausing to take an extra touch, Barnes strode towards Beasant’s faulty clearance and gave it a chrome finish. He caressed it, first-time. With just enough pace and power for it to glide over the rutted, near frozen, grass. The ball reached the far bottom corner of the net a second before the keeper had a chance to make up for his error. Imagine Darren Cunningham, sat in Wolverhampton. In his parent’s living room. The game is on the television. He sees Barnes’ moment of improvisation. He watches Barnes score a goal that few others could. He takes in Caribbean flesh and German idea. Turned, for a few seconds, into art. Barnes’ goal that night. Above football and from it. In football but sprawling out beyond it. Sat there, in Wolverhampton, watching. Something takes hold in Darren. Also being from the Midlands, not from the hustle and bustle of a big city. There’s this sort of space. I mean I took it up constantly practising football or listening to music… A town like Wolverhampton demands that you have something or a hobby to take up that space. Because it’s got country aspects, it creates this sort of channel where it’s quite cerebral and quite ambient. It leaves openings for contemplation. Wolverhampton was, for hundreds of years, a place of coal and iron and steel. Part of the hub of towns that made up The Black Country – the industrial heart of the Midlands – its history meant it turned into a place where goods were manufactured. In 1927 Wolverhampton became the first European home of Goodyear Tyres. On the backs of the Wulfrunian’s who worked at the plant, Goodyear was eventually transformed into the worlds third-largest tyre manufacturer. Wolverhampton, you could say, was a Motor City. A distant cousin to its older, bigger, more well-known relative across the Atlantic. After the Second World War, Britain, hungry for workers to rebuild its heavy industries and manufacturing, sent a call out to its colonies. It was in the 1950s and 1960s that labourers from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent came to Wolverhampton. Settling in Blakenhall, All Saints, Whitmore Reans and Heath Town, these men and women, Black and Brown, set about the hard, dirty, gruelling jobs the English were no longer willing to do. The Caribbeans, Indians and Pakistanis who came to Wolverhampton put up with the work. They saw that the place was somewhere where they could build a life. Where their families could breathe. Where their children had the time and space to think.   After I was sat in a hospital bed aged nineteen, staring starkly at the bonfire of my career, I had to make a decision. Darren Cunningham was at West Bromwich Albion Football Club from the age of nine. To stay with the club for a decade meant he was not far from the first team. To stay with the club for that long meant Cunningham could play. The problem was that his knees could not live up to the image of football he had in his head when he played. They betrayed him. His knees diminished him as a footballer. Like Barnes, Cunningham used his body’s betrayal to find another way. Unlike Barnes, his way was not football. Leg in plaster, Cunningham spent six weeks in his parents garage in Wolverhampton. There, he bought turntables, a mixer and started remaking himself. Music had always been a passion, but football had crowded it out when it came to taking something seriously. Cunningham had danced to new jack swing growing up. He had been taken by the way the music seemed to make you break your own body. Now, with football off the table for good, Cunningham, knees shattered, took to DJing and then to production. Using a Professional Footballers Association injured players fund to hustle his was onto a Recording Arts degree in London, he left his home and jumped, with both feet, into the capital’s underground dance music scene.We didn’t believe in creating false hype, and stubbornly did everything to break the conventional method of promoting. Some of the rules we set were not publicising the acts, and booking producers who had never played in the U.K. We always wanted the flow of information to be less giving to the public. If we gave less away, then you would only get the people who really made an effort—in doing that, we managed to create a vibe which I’ve never really felt anywhere else. It’s something that is still applied to the label. If you make the effort to find out what we’re up to, then it’s our intention to give you something special.Brixton, the home of Black Britain, became Cunningham’s base of operations. It was not long before, with the help of Gavin Weale and Ben Casey, he was running a dance. Called Werk, the night created the conditions for the style of electronic music Cunningham would go on to make. Amongst the acts Werk hosted, the trio managed to pull in Berlin duo Modeselektor and Detroit’s Anthony “Shake” Shakir. Becoming a label in 2003, Werk Discs supported British producers with bold ideas, putting out Zomby’s Where Were U in ’92? (2008) and Lukid’s Onandon (2007). While throwing his energies into the night and the label, Cunningham was, quietly, testing out his own palette of sounds. Studying the incongruous, minimal, psychedelia of Terrence Dixon, Cunningham used Werk Discs to release his debut album Hazyville in 2008. The record was released under an alias. Cunningham became Actress. Hazyville got him noticed as a producer with something new to say. Sidestepping the trap of Intelligent Dance Music, Actress seemed to allow Cunningham to advocate for an abstraction with claws. Two years later and he put out the album which made his name. Issued by Honest Jon’s Records, Splazsh saw Cunningham use Actress to let loose, whilst still demanding that listeners pay attention to the details. It is hard to put the record into words. Splazsh holds two seemingly contradictory positions within the same body. The record is a work out, packed with club heaters. And the record is a commentary on the idea of the work out, a study of what it takes to build a club heater. Followed by R.I.P on the same label (2012), it was not long before Cunningham started working with Ninja Tune. So [clicks fingers] I just feel that, you know, and the sort of in-between-ness of it. I’m never [clicks fingers steadily]. I’m always finding the gaps that are in between. Royal Victoria Docks. East London. July 2012. Bloc Festival was cancelled before it had even begun. In the last great moment of the dance music underground in the city, small clubs and independent promoters got together to put on nights for punters who had planned a weekend of dancing, but now had nowhere to go. Me and some friends chose to go hear Actress at Peckham Palais. We had been taken with Hazyville, then Splazsh, but had never checked him out in person. The Palais, when we got there, was a sauna. A funk box. It was filled with whatever everyone was giving off that night. The mirrors on the walls and ceiling were starting to drip. On record, Actress had sounded to us like he was quiet, contemplative, taking sideways looks at dance music. At the Palais he was something else. Actress slammed records into each other. He ran the sound system ragged. It sounded like he was in a fury. It sounded like he was having fun. We were, for sure. One of the biggest frustrations for me is that you can’t see music. I can see the sounds and the colours that it creates for me, and I’m sure the listener can as well, but you can’t physically see it. I’ve always considered myself an artist that is working with sonics as a discipline, a form of paint.Cunningham once called Actress an image. It was, for him, a picture, an idea. One he could use to look out at the world and to look back at himself. Elsewhere, he has spoken of his music tending to start with “a symbol, or a grabbed moment.”. Whether it was Ghettoville (2014) and the man he saw walking around South London with his life in a shopping trolley, or the chessboard he stumbled across in L.A.’s Pershing Park that became LXXXVII (2023), or the feeling you get on Splazsh of music pounding through the walls of a club and you are stood on the other side, in the smoking area, taking a breather, Cunningham has painted with the Actress image. He has made wordless compositions that allow us to see the world as he sees it through Actress. The March 2014 issue of The Wire ran a profile on Cunningham. Designed to co-ordinate with the released of Ghettoville, Derek Walmsley, from the magazine, spent an afternoon with Cunningham in his home. Walmsely described the scene as the two of them settled down to their conversation: “On the kitchen table is a laptop and a secondhand edition of Dostoyevsky’s The Devils. He’s dropping into it every now and then, he tells me, fifty pages at a time, because it gets too intense.”R.I.P, the album put out through the Actress image in 2012 – before Ghettoville – was a reworking of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. If Cunningham is a painter, then he is reader too. And if he is reading not for pleasure but in order to create, then, you could say, Cunningham is a writer. Heard one way, his music is often at a remove, looking at the world through detached eyes. Heard another way, hidden in all the output on the Actress catalogue, is narrative. Cunningham always seems to be trying to tell us a story. Amidst all the hiss and crackle, the rumble and roar, it is as if we are listening in as the point of a pencil comes down on a piece of paper in a notebook.What he did for me – and why he is so important in terms of my own music making – is that he opened my ears.Miles Davis. Darren Cunningham. It is easy to place them next to each other if you go through Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 1972, Davis released On the Corner. A wild, febrile, hissing jungle of music, the record took inspiration from three sources. The funk of Sly Stone. The electric church of Jimi Hendrix. And the tape manipulation techniques of Stockhausen. The response, from jazz critics, was that Davis had lost his mind. Had given up on his own image. In May 2019, Cunningham performed, in collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra, at The Royal Festival Hall. A piece he called Actress x Stockhausen Sin {x} II, it was a reworking of the German composers’ 1995 work Welt Parliament. The original was an imagined debate, amongst politicians, on the meaning of the word “love”. Actress’ version saw him feed Stockhausen’s conceit through the aftermath of Brexit. It also saw him feed Actress through another image, Young Paint, a machine-learning script developed by Cunningham. Which leaves us with Radical Frame. The forthcoming Actress album to be released by Ninja Tune. Eighteen years since Hazyville, it feels like an apotheosis. The image realized. We get the full gamut of Actress signatures. Short bursts of broken down music. Tiny sketches of zoomed-in sound. Refracted dance floor heat. And we get more. We get appearances from CASISISDEAD (another image, another mask) and Rainy Miller (another artist from the provinces, Preston). Perhaps Radical Frame is a container for everything that Cunningham has built so far. A frame he is handing over to the next in line. The next artist to make their own way in the Black British avant-garde. 

About

The Highways of His Life or M2 (f8)

Dhanveer Singh Brar

Someone much smarter than me. Someone I look up to. Someone I care about. An older brother, if you will, once wrote: 

“the idea of the black avant-garde exists, as it were, oxymoronically – as if black, on the one hand, and avant-garde, on the other hand, each depends for its coherence on the exclusion of the other. Now this is probably an overstatement of the case. Yet it’s all but justified by a vast interdisciplinary text representative not only of a problematically positivist conclusion that the avant-garde has been exclusively Euro-American, but of a deeper, perhaps unconscious, formulation of the avant-garde as necessarily not black. Part of what I’m after now is this: an assertion that the avant-garde is a black thing.”

I have always taken this to mean that when we go searching for a Black avant-garde, we have to be prepared to look in unexpected places. The route to a Black avant-garde, he seems to be saying, involves walking down – what some might consider – peculiar highways. Where they see strangeness, a road leading them nowhere, we see nothing but beauty. The paths Darren Cunningham went down, the highways he took to make Actress, are a chapter in the story of the Black avant-garde. Cunningham the footballer. Cunningham the Wulfrunian. Cunningham the ex-footballer. Cunningham the DJ. Cunningham the Londoner. Cunningham the producer. Cunningham the painter. Cunningham the writer. Cunningham the composer. This is where the Black avant-garde in Britain is made. This is where you have to go to find it. 

Football, in many ways, defines the culture of British music. It always has, and the two go hand in hand through hooliganism and casual fashion, as well as rhythm in terms of how you receive then move – receiving and giving the ball – and strategy in terms of how you play against the other team. They call it ‘The Beautiful Game’, and it is a beautiful game, because it isn’t just about kicking a sphere on a pitch. There’s a lot that goes into it. It can be romantic, strategic, physical, beautiful. It can be so many different things. 

29th December 1996. The Dell. Southampton Football Club’s home ground. They are playing against Liverpool. Late in the game, the score at nil-nil. A pass from one of the visiting midfielders goes awry and deflects off a defender. With the ball sliding out towards the far right of the Southampton penalty area, the home team’s goalkeeper, Dave Beasant, wants to stop the chance of a corner for Liverpool. He rushes out, far from the safety of his goal. Beasant, it seems, has the idea he can kick the ball clear. Up to the other end of the pitch. Away from danger. Beasant’s kick is no good. It lacks power. His timing is all wrong. His kick lacks height. The ball barely makes it to the centre circle. There, to meet it, is John Barnes. 

Imagine a teenager, Black, growing up in Wolverhampton. He is seventeen years old. His parents christened him Darren. His full name is Darren Cunningham. His friends calls him Daz. Darren is a Liverpool fan. He wants to be a footballer. Already on the books at West Bromwich Albion, he could be. Darren is watching the team he supports play Southampton in his family home.

1993 was when football experts in Britain started to realise what kind of player John Barnes really was. Considered one of the best creative players in the country, if not Europe and possibly the world since 1987, Barnes – tall, powerful, left-footed, able to twist opponents inside out – had his skill ascribed to his Caribbean heritage. Jamaica, many in the football pages and on the terraces thought, was not far from Brazil. Betrayed in 1992 by a ruptured achilles, a diminished Barnes could no longer skip past players. The new version of him had to situate itself further back down the pitch, in central midfield. From there, a hidden image of Barnes’ football revealed itself. An image linked to his childhood love of German football. Deploying intricate, more precise movements, he used passing, not running, to marshal an emerging, impressionable, Liverpool team. 

That cold December night in 1996, as the year was ticking towards a close, the Southampton players, the fans in the crowd, and those seeing the game on television, were given a snapshot of what the new Barnes could do. What the old Barnes had always done. Using only a second or two to seize up the angles and distance, without pausing to take an extra touch, Barnes strode towards Beasant’s faulty clearance and gave it a chrome finish. He caressed it, first-time. With just enough pace and power for it to glide over the rutted, near frozen, grass. The ball reached the far bottom corner of the net a second before the keeper had a chance to make up for his error. 

Imagine Darren Cunningham, sat in Wolverhampton. In his parent’s living room. The game is on the television. He sees Barnes’ moment of improvisation. He watches Barnes score a goal that few others could. He takes in Caribbean flesh and German idea. Turned, for a few seconds, into art. Barnes’ goal that night. Above football and from it. In football but sprawling out beyond it. Sat there, in Wolverhampton, watching. Something takes hold in Darren. 

Also being from the Midlands, not from the hustle and bustle of a big city. There’s this sort of space. I mean I took it up constantly practising football or listening to music… A town like Wolverhampton demands that you have something or a hobby to take up that space. Because it’s got country aspects, it creates this sort of channel where it’s quite cerebral and quite ambient. It leaves openings for contemplation. 

Wolverhampton was, for hundreds of years, a place of coal and iron and steel. Part of the hub of towns that made up The Black Country – the industrial heart of the Midlands – its history meant it turned into a place where goods were manufactured. In 1927 Wolverhampton became the first European home of Goodyear Tyres. On the backs of the Wulfrunian’s who worked at the plant, Goodyear was eventually transformed into the worlds third-largest tyre manufacturer. Wolverhampton, you could say, was a Motor City. A distant cousin to its older, bigger, more well-known relative across the Atlantic. 

After the Second World War, Britain, hungry for workers to rebuild its heavy industries and manufacturing, sent a call out to its colonies. It was in the 1950s and 1960s that labourers from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent came to Wolverhampton. Settling in Blakenhall, All Saints, Whitmore Reans and Heath Town, these men and women, Black and Brown, set about the hard, dirty, gruelling jobs the English were no longer willing to do. The Caribbeans, Indians and Pakistanis who came to Wolverhampton put up with the work. They saw that the place was somewhere where they could build a life. Where their families could breathe. Where their children had the time and space to think.   

After I was sat in a hospital bed aged nineteen, staring starkly at the bonfire of my career, I had to make a decision. 

Darren Cunningham was at West Bromwich Albion Football Club from the age of nine. To stay with the club for a decade meant he was not far from the first team. To stay with the club for that long meant Cunningham could play. The problem was that his knees could not live up to the image of football he had in his head when he played. They betrayed him. His knees diminished him as a footballer. 

Like Barnes, Cunningham used his body’s betrayal to find another way. Unlike Barnes, his way was not football. Leg in plaster, Cunningham spent six weeks in his parents garage in Wolverhampton. There, he bought turntables, a mixer and started remaking himself. Music had always been a passion, but football had crowded it out when it came to taking something seriously. Cunningham had danced to new jack swing growing up. He had been taken by the way the music seemed to make you break your own body. Now, with football off the table for good, Cunningham, knees shattered, took to DJing and then to production. Using a Professional Footballers Association injured players fund to hustle his was onto a Recording Arts degree in London, he left his home and jumped, with both feet, into the capital’s underground dance music scene.

We didn’t believe in creating false hype, and stubbornly did everything to break the conventional method of promoting. Some of the rules we set were not publicising the acts, and booking producers who had never played in the U.K. We always wanted the flow of information to be less giving to the public. If we gave less away, then you would only get the people who really made an effort—in doing that, we managed to create a vibe which I’ve never really felt anywhere else. It’s something that is still applied to the label. If you make the effort to find out what we’re up to, then it’s our intention to give you something special.

Brixton, the home of Black Britain, became Cunningham’s base of operations. It was not long before, with the help of Gavin Weale and Ben Casey, he was running a dance. Called Werk, the night created the conditions for the style of electronic music Cunningham would go on to make. Amongst the acts Werk hosted, the trio managed to pull in Berlin duo Modeselektor and Detroit’s Anthony “Shake” Shakir. Becoming a label in 2003, Werk Discs supported British producers with bold ideas, putting out Zomby’s Where Were U in ’92? (2008) and Lukid’s Onandon (2007). 

While throwing his energies into the night and the label, Cunningham was, quietly, testing out his own palette of sounds. Studying the incongruous, minimal, psychedelia of Terrence Dixon, Cunningham used Werk Discs to release his debut album Hazyville in 2008. The record was released under an alias. Cunningham became Actress. Hazyville got him noticed as a producer with something new to say. Sidestepping the trap of Intelligent Dance Music, Actress seemed to allow Cunningham to advocate for an abstraction with claws. 

Two years later and he put out the album which made his name. Issued by Honest Jon’s Records, Splazsh saw Cunningham use Actress to let loose, whilst still demanding that listeners pay attention to the details. It is hard to put the record into words. Splazsh holds two seemingly contradictory positions within the same body. The record is a work out, packed with club heaters. And the record is a commentary on the idea of the work out, a study of what it takes to build a club heater. Followed by R.I.P on the same label (2012), it was not long before Cunningham started working with Ninja Tune. 

So [clicks fingers] I just feel that, you know, and the sort of in-between-ness of it. I’m never [clicks fingers steadily]. I’m always finding the gaps that are in between. 

Royal Victoria Docks. East London. July 2012. Bloc Festival was cancelled before it had even begun. In the last great moment of the dance music underground in the city, small clubs and independent promoters got together to put on nights for punters who had planned a weekend of dancing, but now had nowhere to go. Me and some friends chose to go hear Actress at Peckham Palais. We had been taken with Hazyville, then Splazsh, but had never checked him out in person. The Palais, when we got there, was a sauna. A funk box. It was filled with whatever everyone was giving off that night. The mirrors on the walls and ceiling were starting to drip. On record, Actress had sounded to us like he was quiet, contemplative, taking sideways looks at dance music. At the Palais he was something else. Actress slammed records into each other. He ran the sound system ragged. It sounded like he was in a fury. It sounded like he was having fun. We were, for sure. 

One of the biggest frustrations for me is that you can’t see music. I can see the sounds and the colours that it creates for me, and I’m sure the listener can as well, but you can’t physically see it. I’ve always considered myself an artist that is working with sonics as a discipline, a form of paint.

Cunningham once called Actress an image. It was, for him, a picture, an idea. One he could use to look out at the world and to look back at himself. Elsewhere, he has spoken of his music tending to start with “a symbol, or a grabbed moment.”. Whether it was Ghettoville (2014) and the man he saw walking around South London with his life in a shopping trolley, or the chessboard he stumbled across in L.A.’s Pershing Park that became LXXXVII (2023), or the feeling you get on Splazsh of music pounding through the walls of a club and you are stood on the other side, in the smoking area, taking a breather, Cunningham has painted with the Actress image. He has made wordless compositions that allow us to see the world as he sees it through Actress. 

The March 2014 issue of The Wire ran a profile on Cunningham. Designed to co-ordinate with the released of Ghettoville, Derek Walmsley, from the magazine, spent an afternoon with Cunningham in his home. Walmsely described the scene as the two of them settled down to their conversation: 

“On the kitchen table is a laptop and a secondhand edition of Dostoyevsky’s The Devils. He’s dropping into it every now and then, he tells me, fifty pages at a time, because it gets too intense.”

R.I.P, the album put out through the Actress image in 2012 – before Ghettoville – was a reworking of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. If Cunningham is a painter, then he is reader too. And if he is reading not for pleasure but in order to create, then, you could say, Cunningham is a writer. Heard one way, his music is often at a remove, looking at the world through detached eyes. Heard another way, hidden in all the output on the Actress catalogue, is narrative. Cunningham always seems to be trying to tell us a story. Amidst all the hiss and crackle, the rumble and roar, it is as if we are listening in as the point of a pencil comes down on a piece of paper in a notebook.

What he did for me – and why he is so important in terms of my own music making – is that he opened my ears.

Miles Davis. Darren Cunningham. It is easy to place them next to each other if you go through Karlheinz Stockhausen. 

In 1972, Davis released On the Corner. A wild, febrile, hissing jungle of music, the record took inspiration from three sources. The funk of Sly Stone. The electric church of Jimi Hendrix. And the tape manipulation techniques of Stockhausen. The response, from jazz critics, was that Davis had lost his mind. Had given up on his own image. 

In May 2019, Cunningham performed, in collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra, at The Royal Festival Hall. A piece he called Actress x Stockhausen Sin {x} II, it was a reworking of the German composers’ 1995 work Welt Parliament. The original was an imagined debate, amongst politicians, on the meaning of the word “love”. Actress’ version saw him feed Stockhausen’s conceit through the aftermath of Brexit. It also saw him feed Actress through another image, Young Paint, a machine-learning script developed by Cunningham. 

Which leaves us with Radical Frame. The forthcoming Actress album to be released by Ninja Tune. Eighteen years since Hazyville, it feels like an apotheosis. The image realized. We get the full gamut of Actress signatures. Short bursts of broken down music. Tiny sketches of zoomed-in sound. Refracted dance floor heat. And we get more. We get appearances from CASISISDEAD (another image, another mask) and Rainy Miller (another artist from the provinces, Preston). Perhaps Radical Frame is a container for everything that Cunningham has built so far. A frame he is handing over to the next in line. The next artist to make their own way in the Black British avant-garde.