The human voice doesn’t survive for lengthy within the vacuum of Actress’ music; it’s reduce up, spaghettified, dissolved into fog and smoke. Demonic pitch-shifted voices cackle, howl, and recede into the murk. Sampled divas morph into distant ambulance sirens. All of the whereas, Darren Cunningham carries on an arch, amused, perma-blazed commentary; one imagines him as Rod Serling or Vincent Worth, inviting the enterprising listener to observe him right into a world the place actuality can’t be trusted. His catchphrases and cryptic murmurings are sometimes the one factor connecting the listener to the human world, the one reminder that there’s truly a producer behind all of this and that you simply’re not simply listening to an ailing wind blowing from Tartarus.

Cunningham’s new album LXXXVIII was impressed by chess—the idle pastime of a steel-trap thoughts. There are some remarkably idle stretches on this 57-minute album, which weaves between quick dance tracks and lengthy, intractable expanses of stasis; it’s the inverse of the everyday techno “artist album,” the place the dance tracks are sandwiched between half-baked ambient stocking-stuffers designed to point out off the producer’s compositional bona fides. Lots of the dance tracks on LXXXVIII appear vestigial or underdeveloped; “Oway (f 7 )” is a stark, haunted-sounding loop that by no means builds to something, and “Pluto (a 2) ” cuts off abruptly after lower than three minutes. You get the sense that yawning voids like “Inexperienced Blue Amnesia Magic Haze ( d 7 )” and “Azifiziks ( d 8 )” are the true coronary heart of the file, that when you peer into their depths for lengthy sufficient you would possibly decode among the byzantine logic that drives this music—or perhaps you’re simply watching a black gap.

LXXXVIII is the Roman numeral for 88. That was the title of a relatively spry album Cunningham launched comparatively underneath the radar in 2020, now packaged with the 3xLP version of the brand new file. Additionally it is the variety of keys on a piano, and Cunningham makes use of that instrument as a method to rework his music right into a kind of free jazz. “M2 ( f 8 )” begins out because the type of slight, nacreous keyboard sketch Ryuichi Sakamoto would possibly’ve cranked out between appointments earlier than it’s subsumed right into a loping, side-chained rhythm. “Push Energy ( a 1 )” kicks off the file with a deranged hyena cackle, after which an imperious voice recites robotic instructions and Cunningham ruminates endlessly on a round piano phrase. It scans as a joke on the primary pay attention, a problem on the second, and one thing actually fairly lovely on the third; simply look forward to the voice that bubbles up on the finish and appears to sing, “Cry.”