Actress on Persona, Performance, and Musical Paradoxes

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it, along with a Screen Memories column every one or two weeks where I write about stuff I watched lately.

Here's what's going down today: I last had Darren Cunningham, aka the iconic producer Actress, on the newsletter back in 2024 to talk through the (literal) gamesmanship that went into putting together that year's LXXXVIII. His latest, Radical Frame, came out last month, and it's honestly the most shocking and left-field Actress record in a while (that's a good thing, obviously)—more proof that he's always on his own wavelength, which is exactly what he's been prized for across his increasingly singular career. I got Darren on the horn literally yesterday to talk about the more provocative aspects of Radical Frame, and as always he was an absolute pleasure to talk to and pick his creative mind. Check it out:

Tell me about the structure of this album. You never do the same thing twice, but this record really took me by surprise the first time I put it on.
I've always looked at the album format as something that works really well for the type of music that I like to create. When I'm writing music, sometimes I'll know, in terms of the way certain tracks are taking me, how things are going to piece together. A lot of the times, certain tracks are the setup for the next track. In many ways, tracks within the projects that I make are like devices—little nodes that connect things together. Despite that way of thinking, I've still followed quite a conventional way of putting together an album, whether that's getting to 70 minutes worth of music or three tracks that group together to make six parts, like in R.I.P. and Splazsh. From that perspective, I was still following a conventional route when it comes to programming and arranging the final sequencing.

I'd done two projects with Smalltown Supersound—one which was released with Resident Advisor, which was supposed to be a mix and came out as a one-track album, even though there was probably about 17 or 20 different inserts of music on there. That gave me the initial idea to essentially truncate the album in a format that appears short in length, but sounds quite substantial. It's a paradox in many ways that I've been aiming for. I'd also previously released a limited tape called Zeno's Paradox, and I like the paradoxical idea in music.

The record opens with these two very short tracks that are quite jarring by any standard. Tell me about kicking off the record like that.
The album itself is autobiographical, like a story. When you open a book, you get the preface, and then you might get the introduction to the actual idea, or the context is slammed in the actual story itself. That's the device of the first two tracks. The first track is telling you that, within the construct of the album—and it's also extended to the videos that I released—this actor, actress, producer, songwriter, interpreter is undergoing some sort of experiment. He's conducting the experiments, but there's also an experiment surrounding him, surrounding another experiment. The intention behind that is to wake up the listener to the idea that this is an experiment. That consequently follows with a very shadowy figure issuing a demand, essentially—which, again, is a precursor to the reasons as to why this person might be within the confines of an experiment or hospital of some sort.

Then it goes into the track with CASISDEAD, and you really get the blast of why this character has ended up within the experiment. You get the male explanation, and "Overchord" is the female aspect of it, which is essentially a sort of Florence Nightingale nurse persona taking care of the person who's ended up in this experimental situation—essentially, some sort of mental institution, I guess you could call it. Not to say that I've been in a mental institution [Laughs], but that's kind of where it's going. Those two initial pieces are intended to introduce the actual audio side of the music.

When it comes to albums, for me—and, I think, for most artists as well—you can't get the full context of an album without watching the visual. So whoever buys the album really does have to go watch the videos that have been made to accompany these tracks, because it's part of the wider vision.

Let's talk about the visuals that you made with Anna van der Velde. They're quite distinct from the visual content associated with the Actress project in the past.
Whilst writing the album, and probably for the last five years or so, I've been writing stories, plots, and visual ideas alongside writing music. I'd essentially written a treatment as to what I wanted a film to look like, and I didn't want it just to be a music video either. I presented [comissioner Theresa Adebiyi] the treatment of the story that I wanted to tell, and she went about organizing a shortlist of directors who I spoke to. Anna was on there, and I didn't really know her work that well up until that point. But I realized she was on Stink Productions, a really great production company, so immediately I was quite interested. She's extremely creative and thinks very quickly on the spot, and her setup in terms of what a vision is—it's already there, from the stylists to the rig.

When it came to shooting, I was very skeptical at first about playing three different characters all by myself. I'm not an actor, despite my name—so I was a bit concerned about that. But in the end, with her direction and in terms of how she saw it moving, it was quite easy. I was just being myself, really. I knew during the shoot that the final video was going to be really good, and something different to what people have seen from me in the past—giving my music a completely different angle from what it's previously been. It was a great experience, and she's a great director. I hope to work with her again in the future.

Something really striking about the visuals is that they represent the most that you've been the literal face of Actress. When I see an artist I've followed for a long time make that shift,. I'm always curious to hear them talk about notions of persona and putting yourself out there.
I guess it's all about timing, isn't it? And maturing. It's taken up until this point in my music-making to have felt that I've happened upon a moment where it seemed comfortable enough to sort of show that side of me. But it had to be done in the right context, which was the reason why I'd been writing so much. I knew that there was a story that I wanted to tell. I never imagined that it'd be me who would be the person telling it. I had different ideas in my mind, in that respect.

If I think back to when I first started writing music for Actress and things like that, it was always about persona—but the persona was the music, you know? If there was going to be any visual representation of that, it would usually be a sleeve or something—and even then, I went in the opposite direction, which was oblique shapes, shadows, black and white atmospheres. But I knew at some point that there would be a physical emergence of the person behind the music. I wouldn't consider myself a performing artist, but I'd consider myself somebody who's interested in the performing arts, whether that's Merce Cunningham, John Cage, or ballet. Just loving music videos in general as well, these components at some point were going to be so unrelentingly important, that it was only inevitable that this would happen.

Also, as I said in the beginning, it was timed right for me to do this right now. And I enjoy the process of dressing up. I had to put in some black contact lenses. The whole thing was putting myself in for the physicality of the work, which people don't often get to see. You can show people behind the scenes things, but the actual commitment is another side of the sacrifice of being an artist, and there's a part of me that relishes that side of it. I feel very rewarded for having gone through the steps to do that. On the other side of it, when you get the finished product and it goes out to people, they get to see it and you see the responses to it, which it makes it all worthwhile.

Let's talk about the autobiographical aspect of this album, which you mentioned earlier.
The act of writing music, from the beginning, has always been one of purification and self-therapy. Certainly, when I first started writing, I'd say it was quite a traumatic time for me, because I was going through quite significant changes in terms of direction. I'd moved to a new city, and I was a bit lost ultimately. It was only my music that saved me in many ways, in terms of keeping my balance and focus and having some sort of direction. My absolute obsession with learning the instruments that I was using got me to this point. So, in a lot of ways, I'm very thankful that I was able to pivot towards making music in this way.

It's hard to contextualize this, if I'm being honest with you. This is the part which is very difficult to contextualize, because as a musician, you can keep trying to talk about it, but ultimately it never really comes out in the way that you want it to. It's quite a spiritual thing, the part that's never really explicit to the audience. You can conjure it in a certain way to really penetrate the listener, but it goes even deeper than that. In many ways, "autobiographical probably isn't deep enough to express what it is, which is your expression of your art. Everything that culminates in a video, album, or live performance is the embodiment of your discipline and dedication. So when I say "autobiography," ultimately what I'm saying is, this is as condensed of a visual idea of what I can give to you in terms of what the journey has been like to get to this particular point.

The character [in the visuals] is bandaged, and his hair is graying. There's an aging aspect to this. I first started making music when I was about 18. I'm 47 now. There's a slight luxury aspect to it, which gives the impression that this person has not done too badly financially in terms of their career, but has somehow still ended up in a detrimental situation. There's these symbols within the music, but also within the video, that tells the person who's viewing it that, amongst the beauty, there's always some sort of damage. That's just part of the contract—and when it comes to talking about contracts, the idea of the infinite paper with nothing written on it in itself is a nod to the nature of the music industry on all levels. It's always the same, and there's multiple personas of yourself that you have to be able to tap into to really come through all of that.