"Nothing's Good and Nothing's Bad" - An Interview with Actress

"Darren's trolling."

That was a friend's immediate reaction after we finished listening to Ghettoville, the fourth and latest LP from techno provocateur Darren Cunningham under his Actress moniker. It's a fair assumption. His acclaimed last album R.I.P offered fluid ambient textures, cavernous bass and a quasi-mythical narrative, after which Ghettoville's locked grooves and slabs of brittle noise seem like an attempt to problematize the hype cycle. Throw in a few pre-release quotes about the "end of Actress" and the "death of music" and you can't avoid the suspicion that, yes, Darren's deuces are airborne. And why shouldn't they be? It's 2014, the "internet music conversation" accretes opinions into pre-emptive canonization like mud in a drought, and a bit of meta-narrative prodding from a master producer won't hurt anyone. After all, I love Rival Dealer, but if that wasn't homeboy taking the piss out of his own mythology, well, this definitely was.

I'm simplifying, though. Ghettoville isn't just the "challenging fourth album"—I mean, it is, but Darren's challenging something beyond hypebeasts listening to Spotify on their Fleshlights or whatever. The longer I forced myself to listen, the more my urge to ditch the blasted, trudging tracks for his earlier work fell away. Ghettoville only comes if you don't chase it—case in point, the alien coos slowly peeking from the dusk of "Rims" like birds returning to a smoldering crash site, or the hypnagogic Aphex-isms buoying "Our." Darren's trolling on a molecular level. He's playing with the semiotics of attention, examining how patterns in felt time make us look closer or turn away.

Or maybe it's all bullshit and I should lower my Adderall prescription. Either way, my Skype convo with Darren last week left me with nothing but questions, and I think that's how it should be. Real trolls don't give answers.

Noisey: How are you doing?
Actress: Yeah, I'm alright thanks.

So I've been thinking about how a lot of the songs on Ghettoville felt like one continuous groove, rather than developing and transforming in the way that much of R.I.P. did. Can you discuss the concepts behind your song construction?
I'm not thinking about much really once I'm making tunes. I'm just doing them, really. In terms of how they're put together I'm working off of a number of computers, so I've got different pieces on different computers and then I have a master computer where I stick all the pieces together. But the overall influence for the construction of the songs, I almost wanted to do a DJ Screw kind of techno, you know what I mean?

Right.
And with lots of ideals of hip-hop, but with a techno mentality as well. That's from a construction point of view. I wanted it to be quite beastly in a way, and quite rough, but also quite tangible. It depends on how you bought the record, whether on vinyl or whatever. You can actually sort of manipulate the timing of the record to reveal the track even more. It was things like that really.

So by changing the speed of the vinyl there are new elements you expect people to discover?
Yeah, it's not an expectation, there's just plenty of it. And that comes down to whether you want to either take the music at its face value or if you want to play around with it yourself. That's how I treat my music when I DJ, so it's not an expectation, that's just what it is. There's layers to it.

What were the first rap songs that influenced you?
A lot of early gangster hip-hop. Primarily NWA-style stuff, LA, Compton, Ice Cube. EPMD growing up as well. I couldn't even tell you half of the stuff I was listening to growing up because these were tapes handed down to me by my older cousin.

If you were given the chance to produce for a huge pop star who would you choose?
I mean she's not a massive popstar, but probably someone like Lorde [he pronounced it Lor-day]. I think I could work with anybody is the fact. I'd love to work with Cyndi Lauper for instance. I actually love her music, but it's not really the same. Like I said, producing is completely different to perhaps sitting down and making this sort of music. You still want to introduce a lot of your ideas but you're working in a completely different realm.

You've spoken before about Actress as a character separate from you. When did this self-mythology begin?
The first time was basically when I was thinking how I wanted to present my music, because I didn't want to come out like "This is my name. This is what I want to do." I just thought that was a bit too serious, and a bit too pretentious. That was my feeling at the time, so I wan't thinking about things as deeply. I was looking for something to hide behind, but not necessarily just to hide behind—to answer a lot of the personality traits that I have generally, in terms of my approach to life, music and art. The character formed itself around the music and the interviews that I've done. So I can't really sit here and say, "This is what it was meant to be," because it was never conceived in that way. What you're seeing is the real time version or movie of the whole thing. The music, the records, the videos have shaped the character.

What do you think would be the ideal scenario for someone to experience Ghettoville for the first time?
This is very idealistic, but I would probably do something along the lines of a live performance, not dissimilar to the sort of performance I would do in a club. It's alright on a flat level on CD or vinyl, but sometimes you need to immerse yourself in the frequencies of it to feel the weight. There's a time and a place to sit in the studio and make music that is geared to purely sounding great on your laptop, your speakers, your iPhone, and your earphones, but this sort of music doesn't work in that environment. It's just not geared towards it. That's why I go out and do live performances. I don't shy away from that. The DJ sets that I play, I try to form a map of the moods and the influences so it's not to detached from what the concepts are trying to get at.

I was listening to Ghettoville and thinking about in terms of a reaction against the cultural environment of music consumption today. So you think this record would sound the same if you weren't a well known producer in 2014?
Keep going.

Well, I'm thinking of the abrasive textures as a reaction to the effusive praise and insane cult of personality around producers these days. When did you start feeling reactionary?
That's what my art is. It's always a sort of reaction or response to something, and how I felt at that time in writing the album does not necessarily mean that's how I felt six months down the line. It's just a reaction or response in that given moment. I think across the four albums that I've made, I think you have to sit back and demonstrate certain aspects of what you do. So for the first album, it's quite consistent in terms of the sound. The second album was much more technological, much more about space and a bit more friendly in the dance quality of it. The third album is more about investigating different tonalities and ambient structures and not really involving drums or beats. This one is really a combination of all of that, but tying in and bookending a particular chapter. It could be considered dark, but really, at this point I could envision the character and myself being at a point where it's almost like, washed up, you know what I mean? Hanging on amongst the junk and rubbish. It's getting to the core of that sort of image and creating some music which leaves it open to praise, but also leaves for it to be kicked and rubbished. I wanted it to be really open ended about that. I am proud of that. It's weird and it's shit at the same time. But, it's not shit if you know what i mean. I would never put something out that I thought creatively was rubbish.

Do you think that the media environment that this all takes place in nowadays, the constant focus on the genius of the producer and their personal life and all that, do you think that's been damaging?
No, the thing is nothing really has changed, it's just that we are more acutely aware of nuance these days because we are so connected, so someone's view point massively influences another and another person's. There's plenty of people out there who really love the praise, but I'm not the first to not like the praise. But also, I think you need to expose the fact that nothing's good and nothing's bad, in my mind anyway. You can sit down and listen to something and think it's shit. That's fine, but someone else will get get something out of it, so nothing's really good and nothing's really shit. So, it's kind of a response to everything across the board. This is a record about wholeness. It's like junk. It's like, you see a homeless person with a trolly and he's got a load of junk in his trolly and it means absolutely nothing to a normal person on the street, but it means everything to that person, and you need to ask yourself the question, "Why is this rubbish important to this person? You know, I have everything. I have the big house. The money. I have the car. Why is his junk so important?" That for me is more interesting to investigate as an idea.

Ezra Marcus's Twitter is also a like trolly of junk—@Ezra_marc