Darren J. Cunningham aka Actress has quickly and justly become one of the most respected names in the UK's new dance music underground. His own label, Werk Discs, has proven itself one of the most formidable and taste‐making UK independents of recent times, bringing the world extraordinary albums from Zomby, Lukid, Lone and Actress himself. Cunningham is a hard man to pin down - somehow a key player in the post‐dubstep diaspora and yet not there at all - but everything comes across in his shape‐shifting, richly-textured music.
As Actress he produced the exceptional Hazyville LP, a series of dream-like sketches and ideas, drawing cries for a Mercury Award Nomination. He's remixed Various Production, written for the seminal techno imprint Soma and released on Instra:mental's Nonplus label. In May he released his eagerly‐awaited second album Splazsh for Honest Jon's, British independent record label created and founded by Damon Albarn.
Splazsh is an adventurous, ultra-modern, thoroughly British affair, rummaging about in the inner lives of house and techno, and brilliantly elaborating the accomplishments of his debut, Hazyville - a signature combination of exuberance and introversion, luminescence and puzzlement. Unconstrained by the formal clichés of the dance music he loves, Actress' melodies and arrangements are enthralled by their own genies. In love with the mysteries of groove and repetition, Splazsh is both a culmination and a new beginning for Actress - a substantial and eccentric work from a brave and coolly individual artist, "one of the UK's most fascinating musical figures" (Fact Magazine).