Darren Cunningham is one of those dance music producers who has spent most of his career moving away from the dancefloor. The London-based artist's first two albums as Actress, 2008's Hazyville and 2010's Splazsh, sounded like mid-1980s house and techno collaged together and played on a radio from under the freeway. Half of his newest, R.I.P., doesn't even have beats. Listening to him discuss his process making it-- which included reading John Milton, philosophizing about death, and smoking weed-- you'd think he was a PhD candidate.
"I want to make cool, classical stuff for a modern generation," he said in a recent interview. The phrase "classical stuff" alone will probably disqualify him from the academy. Good. It's not where he belongs. Like Oneohtrix Point Never, what makes Cunningham special is that he's an artist capable of referencing extroverted, populist music like house and rap in order to create a meditative, introverted experience.
In general, his productions are less about their build-and-release than their atmosphere, which hovers over the bones of the music like some sick gas cloud. The innovation on R.I.P. is to put as much effort into making things clean as making them dirty, and the result is a sense of contrast: Fog gives way to clarity; fat, puffy synthesizer sounds play off pinprick-sharp ones. Like all good contrasts, it's simple and eureka-like: By bringing the acidic sounds to the surface and keeping the air-conditioner hum somewhere in the depths, Cunningham takes the monolithic sound of his earlier productions and breaks them into layers-- compared to Splazsh, it's practically prismatic.
It's not the sound that makes the music, though, but the structure of it. R.I.P. is a deliberately uncoordinated album. Rhythms, basslines, and melodies slip in and out of line with each other. Comparatively straightforward, house-oriented tracks like "Shadow From Tartarus" are situated next to murk and ambience like "Tree of Knowledge". The emphasis here, though, is on "comparative": Even R.I.P.'s steady 4/4 tracks sound grimy and deconstructed. But there's something almost flirtatious in the way he lets the sounds worm around in the dark, looking to hook up with something firm. When they do, it's both mechanical and mystical, like watching a sculpture cut from raw stone.
The thick crud over Cunningham's earlier albums mimicked a sense of loss and erosion, as though he'd found the music abandoned in an alleyway and brought it back to something resembling life. The disparate sounds on R.I.P don't need resuscitation, just room to breathe. Given that room, they arrange themselves. If the album could be called intimate, it's paradoxically because there's so much distance and disconnect to it. Listening to it can be like seeing the city you live in from a plane: You can't reach out and touch it but you're comforted by how manageable and well-planned it all looks.
Cunningham's scope is already wider than producers like Burial or Zomby, who tend to keep dance music's vocabulary intact, even at their most abstract. When Splazsh first started going around, Cunningham called it "R&B concrete," which, as marketing speak, was terrific, but as self-description was mostly aspirational. On R.I.P., the blending between the traditions of techno and the traditions of ambient and minimalist music are more apparent. Until he comes up with something better (or it ends up being used for a soda campaign), "cool, classical stuff for a modern generation" will have to work. As for his shift in focus, he confesses to not getting quite as stoned as he used to. The fresh air has done him good.
