Actress - Shocktherapy101

In a recent interview for Dazed And Confused Darren Cunningham discussed the music he made as Actress, musing about early computer programming as: “a really naïve idea of typing down what someone has given you and seeing what the computer spits out and then it becomes language, language data. And you can kind of make sense of it.”

‘R.I.P’, The most recent album of this remarkable London producer can be seen as a process of understanding this fact – that the upshot of the digital age is that our language and our stories have become data. His practice of releasing music outside through Twitter and disappearing Soundclouds has been discussed in depth elsewhere on Dummy, and here is the latest, ShockTherapy101, released into Twitter’s ether yesterday like a whisper, or an inert gas, or a nerve agent. If Actress’s albums are about the process of our myths and souls becoming part of the cloud, these split releases are as important, if not more so. Suggesting Detroit techno and Turner’s clouds, it’s majestically unformed. Even though this was released in an instant, it’s a fluent expression of where Actress’s mind is, transported through the net for us all to hear.