Actress – Radical Frame (2026)

Direct downloads for TMF users. JOIN NOW!

turbobit.net
filespace.com
filespace.com 320

Actress assumes the role of visionary veteran on ‘Radical Frame’, his 12th solo LP – give or take – graced by CASISDEAD & Rainy Miller cameos, and his subtlest hallmarks of composition riddled within its unique atmospheric physics and distinctive electronic brushstrokes.

Prodigal Wulfrunian Darren Cunningham aka Actress ascends his throne as leading innovator of Black British music with ‘Radical Frame’: a chiral carousel of ephemeral grayscale soul iridescence on the A-side, contrasting a landscape-scale B-side diffusing Rainy Miller’s poetry across 16 mins of rangy ambient footwork. Viewed from any angle, it’s his most concise, hermetic, yet expansive, long player, proving he’s equally adroit at tending to hypermodern attention spans as he is able to zoom out, see the wood for the trees.

“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.”- Fred Moten

Rolling on from notable unions with London Contemporary Orchestra on 2018’s ‘Lageos’, and the recent ‘Concrète Waves’ with Suzanne Ciani on his revived label, Werk Discs, ‘Radical Frame’ distills a life story spanning early years as pro footballer, to shifts from Wolverhampton to London, and trusting his intuition to bloom as a multi-talented artist over the past 20 odd years.

It plays out as a sort of fractious tension and release in the first half, with Gerald Donald-esque vocoder experiments giving way to CASISDEAD bars on a ‘Live By You’ recalling the Grim dubs era of his Werk Discs, to overeasy chamber soul on ‘Overchord’, and fine-wrought deep house abstracts in ‘Withending’ and ‘Paris’.

However the B-side is most impressive, strafing a 16 min soundscape ‘Sheets’, where Rainy Miller’s almost subvocalised thoughts are diffused into the gloaming aether on a lush backdrop of skittish jit that salutes 4Hero via Urban Tribe with a signature sense of urbane ennui and British blooz, also comparable to Klein’s recent turn toward broader canvases.