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Actress
artist

Actress

Actress is an experimental artist from United Kingdom formed in 2008. 45 releases are catalogued on Riffiter.

Experimental · United Kingdom · Best experimental albums

45
Releases
2008–2026
Active years
2008
Formed

Discography

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Hazyville cover

Most popular

Hazyville

2008 · 11 tracks

Singles & EPs

28

Live & compilations

1

Collaborators

1

Upcoming shows

Actress

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Community

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Actress at a glance

Born in
Wolverhampton
From
United Kingdom
Active since
2004
Labels
Werkdiscs

Facts from Wikidata (CC0). Children listed are those with their own public record, so the list may be incomplete.

About

Actress is the artist alias of London’s Darren Cunningham. If you’re looking for clues to his music, you’re better off starting with “Hazyville”, the title of his debut album. The record presents a landscape as blurry as its title, with house and hiphop beats dissolving into a spray of bits and tape hiss. When “Hazyville” came out in 2008, it sounded unlike anything else out there — you could hear echoes of the familiar (Moodymann, Jan Jelinek, ‘80s R&B, wonky), but it was spun into an uncanny kind of dreamstate. Cunningham also runs Werk Discs; the label had something of a hit in 2008 with Zomby’s “Where Were U in ‘92?”, and its roster runs from the street-bass sounds of Philadelphia’s Starkey to the brilliant instrumental hiphop of Lukid and Lone.

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Much of Actress’ music is deliberately lo-fi, suffused with the slippery grit of encoding errors and low-bitrate YouTube videos, to the point that the distortion and compression become strangely beautiful in their own right. It’s the modern-day equivalent of boom-bap hiphop’s preference for scratchy wax, which makes sense, since today’s crate-diggers are increasingly discovering the musical past not through thrift-store vinyl, but dubious VHS dubs uploaded to the web, grainy and flickering with errant pixels.

Actress in brief

How many Actress releases are on Riffiter?
45 releases are catalogued, spanning 2008 to 2026.
When was Actress formed?
Actress formed in 2008, in United Kingdom.
What genre is Actress?
Actress is catalogued under Experimental.
What is the most recent Actress release on Riffiter?
Concrète Waves, released in 2026.

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