Since she started making music with a Buchla synthesizer in 1968—an obsession that landed her a job actually manufacturing the machines, soldering iron in hand, until she saved up enough money to buy her own—Suzanne Ciani has embodied electronic music’s spirit of limitless possibility. Instead of imitating other instruments and conforming to conventional musical ideas, Buchla (and Ciani) set out to create a paradigm based on harnessing the flow of electricity itself. Ciani’s method with the Buchla is a way of taming electrical currents and shaping them into pathways, rather than composing music traditionally. She would later become known as a prominent new-age artist and a composer of commercial music for brands like Coca-Cola, but in the last 20 years, she’s reconnected with her groundbreaking legacy. She’s almost 80 now, and to see her play live is to feel the power of energy itself. Using a quadraphonic array of speakers, she sends oscillations whipping through the room like a mystical mage channeling the elements.
UK dance-music artist Actress, aka Darren Cunningham, looks at electronic music through a very different lens: making it sound gnarled, physically corroded, almost ancient. Building on the bones of Detroit techno and electro, his best records are hallucinogenic portals into worlds made out of 8-bit textures, rusty bleeps, and the occasional forlorn piano or sandpapery vocal sample. Though his arrangements are more structured than Ciani’s freeform live performances, he shows a similar disregard for the rules of dance music or songwriting. On Actress records, dreary passages are drawn out for long periods of time, and pretty sections are shattered by digital noise and detritus. Ciani and Cunningham have few comparable peers, yet they don’t have much more in common than that. That’s part of what makes Concréte Waves so enticing.
The album comprises recordings from two 2025 concerts in London and Barcelona, and while the sound quality makes it clear you’re listening to a show and not a studio album, Concréte Waves stands tall in each artist’s discography. Both gigs follow a similar arc—quiet and plonky to rowdy and abrasive—but they take different journeys there. The performances are improvisational, mostly devoid of quantization or the prefabricated sections of so many contemporary live electronic sets. The only time contemporary dance music rears its head is when Cunningham drops a kick drum to frame the duo’s meanderings, in the same manner that Ciani uses control voltages to corral her buzzing sounds.
It’s usually easy to tell who’s doing what here. Cunningham’s Fisher-Price pianos and decrepit drums are unmistakable, as is Ciani’s Buchla, which whooshes and rattles like a steam engine barreling down the tracks. The first concert starts with Ciani’s signature ocean sounds before Cunningham’s chords—dull, glassy—add an atonal sheen. Eventually things hit blastoff as Cunningham puts a kick drum under Ciani’s percolating synths, a fusion of old and new that only underlines how badass Ciani’s sounds are.
The most galvanizing passages are when Ciani and Actress tangle up in each other, when it becomes hard to tease out what exactly you’re hearing. A loping drum pattern and crystalline synths—like water droplets dripping from stalactites onto the bottom of a cave—appear during a particularly pretty moment midway through the London concert. At the other extreme, the midway point of the Barcelona concert is full of heart-palpitating Buchla jabs, with a harrowing screech that sounds like the cries of a particularly aggravated baby.
That unnerving bawl, which reappears at the rousing finale of the Barcelona concert, reflects the control Ciani has over her instrument, a mastery she’s built over almost 50 years of practice. It’s also the reason a lot of her recent work sounds the same as it did in the mid-’70s, before her dips into ambient and new age in the ’80s and ’90s. She’s still using the same equipment because she hasn’t found anything more innovative or versatile. Other collaborations have set Ciani up with like-minded artists like Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, but Cunningham makes for an inspired pairing because he exists in a different continuum. He’s not a disciple of Ciani’s so much as a mirror image reflected back decades later, with a similar disregard for following rules. Concrète Waves feels less like an intergenerational face-off and more like a meeting of brilliant minds on the same terms.
Listening to Concréte Waves all the way through—90 minutes—can be demanding if you’re not someone who takes pleasure in the sensation of sound itself. It feels slightly more techno-oriented than Ciani’s usual post-2016 live sets, which take audiences through hell and back, usually culminating in the schmaltzy heaven of “The Velocity of Love.” But the only peace on Concréte Waves is the occasional pullback, a calming of the storm rather than the coming of a resolution. Some moments are whisper-quiet, and other passages drag on too long. Occasionally the two musicians sound like they’re wrestling for control over each other. But that’s the nature of improvisation, the same controlled randomness that has guided both artists throughout their entire careers.
