Actress, real name Darren Jordan Cunningham, returns with a new album and chrome aspect journey into a parallel world. The mysterious UK producer has announced AZD, out Friday April 14 on Ninja Tune via Inertia Music.

An artist who has always preferred to make music than to talk about it, in AZD Actress has achieved another remarkable landmark, one which is as resistant to interpretation as it is demanding of it. Following on from his previous albums, R.I.P, Splazsh and Hazyville, an epilogue poem attached to the press release for Ghettoville was construed by media, commentators and spectators that Cunningham had retired. This led him to conceptualise this mass of conclusion as the key to “Giving power back to identity.”

Now he returns with a new album and a new music system – AZD (pronounced “Azid”). An artist who has always preferred to make music than to talk about it, in AZD he has achieved another remarkable landmark, one which is as resistant to interpretation as it is demanding of it.

Through the chromatic themed concept behind the album, Actress has carved reflective surfaces to see the self in, as well as shaping luminous voids out of any idea of colour, finely focusing blacks and whites in the perfect metaphor for the bleakness of life in the Metropolis. This is none more apparent than in the lead single from AZD, “X22REME” which elegantly plays between the line of Oriental classic rave and Balinese warehouse Techno machined in a Rotherhithe lock up welding the grooves into a seamless cracked joint.

Watch the video for “X22REME” below:

“I did fifty versions of the same tune” Cunningham recalls. “Different parts were on tape, CD, different old computers and USB sticks, so it was quite intimidating to revisit and complete. The track was in the end built out of 3 hours of different passages.” The finished work is harsh and beautiful all at once, its incredible complexity never overwhelming its drive. 

“X22RME“ is a key note example of the influence the Black artists James Hampton and Rammellzee had on the creation of AZD – a man who created art through “sourcing castaway materials from their environment and reinterpreting them into absolute majesty given from the fourth dimension.”

The simplest you could say about AZD is that it’s art – the unique creation of a unique mind. There will be few more distinctive, brilliant or visionary suites of music released in 2017. Call him what you will, this is the year that Darren ‘Daz’ Cunningham – aka Actress, aka AZD – asserts more clearly than ever before his complete independence.

It’s an album which logically sums complexity with elegance, and diverts non logical linguistic tanks through the dispersion and subversion of ghetto gothic cut up technology. Described by Cunningham as “Non dance based civilian mind groove, mapped to an external soul beyond the collapsing black hole…Music is chaos R.I.P Music”

Actress
AZD

1. NIMBUS
2. UNTITLED 7
3. FANTASYNTH
4. BLUE WINDOW
5. CYN
6. X22RME
7. RUNNER
8. FALLING RIZLAS
9. DANCING IN THE SMOKE
10. FAURE IN CHROME
11. THERE’S AN ANGEL IN THE SHOWER
12. VISA

AZD by Actress is out Friday April 14 on Ninja Tune via Inertia Music
Pre-order now: https://InertiaMusic.lnk.to/AZD

AMPLIFY – BA