ACTRESS - RADICAL FRAME (CD)

Across an expansive discography of more than ten LPs, Actress has created his own arcane language of hermetic references and inter-dimensional electronic composition. Radical Frame arrives 18 years since debut album Hazyville, and it feels like an apotheosis. The image realised. We get the full gamut of Actress signatures. Short bursts of broken down music. Tiny sketches of zoomed-in sound. Refracted dance floor heat. And we get more. We get appearances from CASISDEAD on 'Live By You' (another image, another mask) and Rainy Miller (another artist from the provinces, Preston). Today, we get 'Overchord' - the centre of the album paired with its precursor 'Live By You'. It arrives alongside a video by Anna van der Velde, featuring Cunningham trapped in a luxury prison of his own making, contained but not constrained. Perhaps Radical Frame is a container for everything that Cunningham has built so far. A frame he is handing over to the next in line. The next artist to make their own way in the Black British avant-garde.